In Focus: Alfred Stieglitz : Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum
It's hard to imagine what another book about Stieglitz, the most written-about figure in American photography, could contribute. Well, this one offers some unfamiliar images and, more notably, an essay arguing that Stieglitz did his best work late in life at his family retreat at Lake George, New York. Photographic curator and historian John Szarkowski is responsible for the latter, which advances a Stieglitz who in the late work turned from public themes and public life to personal symbols (clouds and dying poplar trees) and to sweetly human descriptions of friends, young women, and, of course, his fascinating wife, Georgia O'Keeffe. Whether these late pictures are Stieglitz's best is really still an open question. Contradicting the self-mythologizing of his earlier work, however, these 93 photographs, full of a heartfelt directness, show him to be a man like other men, who appreciated beauty, the weather, family, friends, and home.Gretchen Garner