Camera Work

American pioneer Alfred Stieglitz defined early 20th-century photography, creating the school of “Photo Secessionism” and founding cult art, literature, and avant-garde photo journal Camera Work. This beautiful book reproduces the entire 50-issue run, originally published between 1903 and 1917—a benchmark of photography as art form.

Photographer, writer, publisher, and curator Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was a visionary far ahead of his time. Around the turn of the 20th century, he founded the Photo-Secession, a progressive movement concerned with advancing the creative possibilities of photography, and by 1903 began publishing Camera Work, an avant-garde magazine devoted to voicing the ideas, both in images and words, of the Photo-Secession. Camera Work was the first photo journal whose focus was visual, rather than technical, and its illustrations were of the highest quality hand-pulled photogravure printed on Japanese tissue. This book brings together all photographs from the journal’s 50 issues.