The Steerage

In the early decades of the twentieth century, numerous photographers were drawn in by the fascination New York City awakened. Many encountered one another on the pages of the magazine Camera Work, edited from 1903 to 1917 by Alfred Stieglitz, with the collaboration of Edward Steichen and other artists. One such example was Alvin Langdon Coburn, known for his technical innovations and abstract explorations in photography. Another was a young Paul Strand, who introduced a more direct and realist focus that broke, definitively, from pictorialist trends. In addition to advocating photography as an art form, the magazine became a vehicle for modernity in the United States, its influence continuing in the photographic work of artists like Berenice Abbott, who worked on her project Changing New York over a number of years. Some of these photographic images had a major impact and would soon become part of collective memory as modern icons.

Concha Calvo Salanova