Mar 23, 2010 - Sale 2208

Sale 2208 - Lot 73

Unsold
Estimate: $ 50,000 - $ 75,000
STIEGLITZ, ALFRED (1864-1946)
"Going Home by Ferry, New York City." Silver print, 4x5 inches (10.2x12.7 cm.), mounted. 1902; printed 1920s
Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

Acquired from the collection of Doris Bry in 1994.
The Photograph and the American Dream 1840-1940, 181.

Alfred Stieglitz (2002), Volume I, 167.

According to curator and scholar Sarah Greenough, only one other example of this image exists and is part of "the key set" at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Stieglitz apparently made this photograph on the East 34th Street Ferry as it traveled from Manhattan to Long Island City.
In this enchanting Stieglitz photograph we share the gaze of the urban commuter-craning, rushing, and impatient-bound for home. New York City is the luminous background, vividly juxtaposing the solitary individual and the teeming mass that is the city. The tiny figures in the foreground (including a horse at the lower left) are dwarfed by the city beyond and particularly so by the enormous, sublime plume of smoke rising in the distance. Stieglitz, one of New York City's most poetic and muscular photographers, captures both the intimacy and the modern isolation of the early twentieth-century urban environment.

When this photograph was taken Stieglitz had recently returned to New York from Europe. He had found an artistic niche in Europe, one that had little to do with the skyscrapers and much in common with the nineteenth-century picturesque. His family precipitated his return in 1890, however Stieglitz soon found inspiration and a ready audience among the streets of Gilded Age New York. In these early images of New York City, he often used smoke and weather to both mask and illuminate the urban landscape, effectively both concealing the city's modernity while also juxtaposing the new urban environment with the natural environment it displaced. In this image, Stieglitz both confronts the city and keeps it at a distance, concealing its newness, tempering its cacophony, but moving, ever moving, towards it. Arriving by water the city looms, beckons, and bewilders.

During the course of his long career, Stieglitz produced more than 2,500 mounted photographs. After his death Georgia O'Keeffe assembled a complete set of his photographs, selecting in most cases what she considered to be only the finest print of each image he made. She chose only those prints that Stieglitz had personally mounted, since he did not consider a work to be finished until he completed this step. In 1949 she donated the first part of what she called the "key set" of 1,317 Stieglitz photographs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. (in 1980 she added to the set another 325 photographs taken by Stieglitz of her).