A Bit of Venice

Born in New Jersey, Alfred Stieglitz traveled to Berlin in 1881 to study engineering. There, he was mentored by photochemist and photographer Hermann Vogel, and began making his own photographs. Over the next decades, Stieglitz assumed a legendary role, first in Europe and then in the United States, as a leader and spokesperson for the Photo-Secession movement to ensure that photography was recognized as a "distinctive medium of individual expression" and to introduce modernism to America. Stieglitz also championed the concept of the history of photography, rediscovering and exhibiting the work of photographers like David Hill and Robert Adamson and Julia Margaret Cameron. Stieglitz's nonhierarchical approach to media- he exhibited paintings and sculpture by Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, as well as photographs, in his gallery, known as "291," its location on Fifth Avenue-encouraged specialists and the public to think about photography in a new way.

Stieglitz produced some of his earliest work in Venice, a city that has long been a magnet for artists. A Bit of Venice exemplifies Stieglitz's pictorial formal concerns in its use of light and climate to blur contours and detail. The vertical format and the patterns of light capturing the watery atmosphere of the scene recall Whistler's etchings of Venetian subjects, and may even have been intended as an homage to the artist.