Object Details
Artist
Alfred Stieglitz
Date
1902 (negative); ca. 1910 (print)
Medium
Photogravure on tissue, mounted on board
Dimensions
Image: 9 3/8 × 12 1/16 inches (23.8 × 30.6 cm)
Sheet: 10 3/16 × 12 7/8 inches (25.9 × 32.7 cm)
Mount: 10 3/8 × 12 7/8 inches (26.4 × 32.7 cm)
Credit Line
Gift of Diann G. Mann, Class of 1966, and Thomas A. Mann, Class of 1964
Object
Number
2018.095.003
The train in the Long Island City railyard advances toward the photographer, a blast of black smoke (…)
The train in the Long Island City railyard advances toward the photographer, a blast of black smoke emitting endlessly into the sky. Everything in the frame seems obscured by that smoke, save the tracks crisscrossing, luminous, to the vanishing point. Stieglitz published the image in the inaugural issue of his influential journal Camera Work, demonstrating to his audience of photographers that Pictorialist aesthetics and concepts could be brought to bear as beautifully on industrial, urban subjects as on pastoral scenes. Going further, in The Hand of Man he draws the machine and photography together, as human-wielded instruments of transformational, creative power. (“Celebrating Reunion at the Johnson,” text by Kate Addleman-Frankel and presented at the Johnson Museum May 25-July 28, 2019)
