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An Eternal Flame: Alfred Stieglitz on New York’s Lower East Side

In 1917, Alfred Stieglitz—the son of two first-generation German Jewish immigrants—displayed his autobiographically loaded 1907 photograph The Steerage in an exhibition held at the headquarters of the newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward. Curated by the Jewish collective the People’s Art Guild, under the leadership of Polish-born artist John Weichsel, the exhibition was designed to weave traces of the Uptown gallery scene into the Yiddish-inflected culture of the Lower East Side. Six years before Stieglitz displayed The Steerage in the exhibition at the Forward Building, he revealed it to the public in the October 1911 volume of his journal Camera Work, evoking the waves that brought his own ancestors to American shores in the mid-nineteenth century even as he struggled to obscure the resonances of his familial past. To pull The Steerage out of the pages of Camera Work—to display it in Weichsel’s exhibition without so much as a protective veil of subtlety and metaphor—was, for Stieglitz, to risk extinguishing the fragile flicker of his artistic influence. Indeed, I argue that Stieglitz maintained his position as an American cultural leader by masking his immigrant roots and fighting, continually, to become an American. His ancestral past, however, always lingered. It surfaced in and around The Steerage, on the verge of invisibility. It took form in his yearning for a sense of belonging, in his ambivalence about the exhibition on the Lower East Side, and in his desire to obscure his immigrant roots.