| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,500,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this research is to reexamine the development of Alfred Stieglitz's view of photography and to elucidate the formation of the American avant-garde in the first decade of the twentieth century and its development until 1940s.
His view of photography, from his formative years in Berlin, continued to swing between the two poles : the ‘romanticism' based on philosophy of LIFE similar to that of Whitman, and the ‘scientific realism' tinted with contemporary physiological optics and phenomenalism. Stieglitz ended by adopting the romanticist view that LIFE can be embodied in a photograph.
In the meantime, he fought to establish photography as an accepted form of art on the basis of his version of pictorialism. His loyalty to picture-making-codes in Europe paradoxically enabled him to break with the pictorialist movement and to assimilate contemporary abstract painting. In the early 1910s, however, Stieglitz was confronted with the difficulty of making perfectly abstract photographs, In the late 1910s, to overcome this difficulty, he began to argue that, penetrating a camera as organic instrument, the photographer can embody LIFE. This romanticist conception of photography seemingly led to his belief that one could settle the innate conflicts in photography which prevented it from being accepted as a form of art. But in the presence of Stieglitz, ironically Duchamp's Fountain had called art itself in question.
Notwithstanding his failure to recognize the nature of his ultimate version of photographic aesthetics, it is necessary to reinterpret his works, especially ‘Equivalents and Nude.' In addition, it should be admitted that his experimental attitude and openness enabled him to play an active role as the American importer and promoter of modern European masters and to continue to exhibit innovative American works and influence the development of the American avant-garde until the end of World War II.
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