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At a time when the artistic merit of photography was still highly contested, Marcel Proust emphatically declared “photography is indeed an art.” Throughout his career Alfred Stieglitz devoted much of his effort to raising the status of photography to that of the traditional fine arts.
Though he would later reject the term, during the early years of his activity Stieglitz championed a mode of photography called pictorialism. To challenge the notion that photography was merely an automated process inferior to painting, pictorialists employed techniques that emphasized the intervention of the human hand in the production of the photographic image. The soft focus of A Wet Day On The Boulevard - Paris, 1897 distances the image from the scientific objectivity associated with photography and suggests that it is the artist's interpretation of the scene, like a painting would be. To assert photography's place alongside the established tradition of painting, pictorialists often chose subjects from the history of painting. A Wet Day On The Boulevard - Paris, 1897 may be Stieglitz' response to an iconic painting from twenty years earlier, Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877 (now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago). |
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
A Wet Day On The Boulevard - Paris, 1897 Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Fund for the Acquisition of Photographs, 2010.538.3 |