Alfred!Stieglitz: The 'Aeroplane'

Throughout his career, Alfred Stieglitz evinced a fascination with transport of all kinds. One of his early pictures, which was to become one of his most famous, is Winter, Fifth Avenue of 1892, depicting a horse-drawn carriage churning through a fierce blizzard. Stieglitz stood outside in the storm until he caught just the composition he wanted: thick ridges of slush, the bulk of the carriage, the straining horses and their crouching driver, and everywhere the blurry streaks of wind-whipped snow. His intent, as he later described it, was to demonstrate what a photographer could do with a hand-camera. In many of his later photographs as well, he used vehicular motion as a vector and a metaphor for photographic modernism. © 2004 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.