Over his fifty-year career, Stieglitz was responsible for making photography an acceptable art form alongside painting and sculpture. Stieglitz was born the eldest of six children in Hoboken, New Jersey, and raised in a brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His father moved his family to Germany in 1881. The next year, Stieglitz began studying mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and soon switched to photography. Traveling through the European countryside with his camera, he took many photographs of peasants working on the Dutch seacoast and undisturbed nature within Germany’s Black Forest and won prizes and attention throughout Europe in the 1880s.

Over the years, some photographs have become icons of a particular message, though implicated wrongly in a story line. The Steerage is among the most notorious of these. It is often interpreted as a stark examination of immigrants disembarking from the unsavory depths of steerage (as compared to the wealthier patrons seen overhead) to seek their fortune in the New World—thus, an image of hope. The photograph was, in fact, taken by Stieglitz as he was boarding a ship bound for Germany, and these immigrants are actually returning to their homelands, disenchanted with the life they found in the United States.