The City of Ambitions
Print
The City of Ambitions
1910
Photogravure
Image: 13 5/16 × 10 1/4 in. (33.8 × 26 cm)
Paper: 18 1/4 × 12 13/16 in. (46.4 × 32.6 cm)
Matted: 28 × 22 in. (71.1 × 55.9 cm)
Purchase
1974.0052.0072
Inscriptions Inscribed in pencil on verso: A. Stieglitz: City of Ambition
Stamped in ink on mount verso: Eastman Historical Photograpic Collection
Inscribed in pencil on mount verso: 32-3
Stamped in ink on mount verso: Eastman Historical Photograpic Collection
Inscribed in pencil on mount verso: 32-3
TextDuring the first decades of the twentieth century, Alfred Stieglitz used his New York gallery and influential arts journal, Camera Work, as platforms to promote photography as being a fine art medium equal in importance to the modern painting and sculpture that he also supported. City of Ambition was made in 1910, the year his well-known Photo-Secession group, which had been founded eight years earlier to advance photography as an art form, began to disband. A deliberate challenge to amateur snapshot photography, the hazy, atmospheric, and romantic quality of City of Ambition is consistent with the work of his fellow Photo-Secessionists and is made more rich and seductive by the photogravure process by which it is printed. However, unlike his contemporaries who tended to photograph genteel subject matter, Stieglitz instead focused his camera on the Manhattan’s newly built skyscrapers, a wholly modern, contemporary subject.
