The Dancing Trees
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946)
1922
- Medium
- Palladium print
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- 24.3 × 19.5 cm (image) 25.1 × 20.1 cm (paper)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Photography and Media
- Credit line
- Alfred Stieglitz Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
A photographer who vigorously promoted the work of modern artists in all media, Alfred Stieglitz spearheaded turn–of–the–century debates on the role of photography as a fine art. Initially, this inquiry led him to promote Pictorialism, a style imitative of painting. By the 1910s, however, he had renounced this painterly mode in favor of “straight photography,” exploring qualities that—so he argued—photography alone possessed. At his summer house on Lake George, in upstate New York, Stieglitz isolated the components of landscape, photographing clouds without any indication of a horizon line and sections of trees separated from the surrounding woods. In The Dancing Trees, the composition produced by the layered and interlaced trunks and branches highlights Stieglitz’s primary aim at this time: “to think more about the relationships in the pictures than subject–matter for its own sake.
For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
