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A photographic movement of the 1880s–1910s that sought to elevate photography to the status of fine art by imitating the visual qualities of painting. Pictorialist photographers used soft focus, hand manipulation of prints, gum bichromate processes, and allegorical or painterly subject matter to produce images that looked like paintings rather than photographs. Stieglitz was initially a leading Pictorialist before breaking with the movement in favor of "straight photography" — sharp, unmanipulated images that exploited what was uniquely photographic rather than what was painterly.

The modernist photographic aesthetic developed by Stieglitz, Strand, and their circle in the 1910s, later articulated as a movement by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams in their Group f/64 manifesto (1932). Straight photography rejected all manipulation of the negative or print, used the full tonal range of the photographic medium, and valued sharp focus and precise rendering of subjects. Its argument was that photography's claim to seriousness lay in doing what photography could uniquely do — not in imitating painting. Paul Strand's 1916 photographs are the earliest and most complete realization of the straight photography program.

A photographic quarterly published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. It printed photogravures — high-quality photomechanical reproductions — of work shown at Gallery 291, accompanied by critical essays about photography, art, and culture. The production quality was extraordinary: each issue was printed on fine paper with hand-pulled photogravures tipped in by hand. Fifty issues were published; today original copies are extremely rare and valuable. Camera Work is the primary documentary record of the Gallery 291 argument for photography as art, and it published work by Stieglitz, Strand, Steichen, and others who would define American modernist photography.

Alfred Stieglitz photographed Georgia O'Keeffe approximately 350 times between 1917 and 1937. The series includes nudes, portraits, close-ups of hands and torso, and fully clothed formal portraits. Stieglitz exhibited portions of the series at 291 in 1921 and the response was immediate — critics established O'Keeffe in the public imagination as a woman of intense sexuality before they had seen much of her painting. When O'Keeffe's flower paintings were shown the following year, critics applied the sexual frame that Stieglitz's photographs had established. O'Keeffe denied this reading for the rest of her life. She said of one critic's interpretation: "He read erotic symbols into my pictures. I was furious." The photographs and the flowers together constitute one of the most complex cases of photographic representation shaping artistic reception in American art history.

American photographer and gallerist who was the central figure in establishing photography as a fine art in the United States. Born in Hoboken to German-Jewish immigrants, he studied engineering in Berlin before turning to photography. He founded the Photo-Secession movement (1902), Gallery 291 (1905), and the journal Camera Work (1903–1917), using each to argue that photography belonged in galleries and museums alongside painting and sculpture. His own photographic work ranged from documentary street photography (The Steerage, 1907) to pure abstraction (the Equivalents, 1925–1934). He was also the partner and primary promoter of Georgia O'Keeffe, whose career he shaped in complicated ways. After Gallery 291 closed in 1917, he ran the Intimate Gallery (1925–1929) and An American Place (1929–1946).

American photographer trained at the Ethical Culture School in New York under the photographer and social reformer Lewis Hine (a connection that would shape his social conscience). He encountered Stieglitz's work through Gallery 291 and Camera Work, and by 1915 had developed the sharp, geometrically precise visual language that would define his career. His 1916 photographs — Wall Street, Blind Woman, White Fence — were published in the final issue of Camera Work and immediately recognized as a new departure in the medium. He later worked in documentary film and spent much of his later career in France and Mexico, producing major photographic books on specific communities. He was an avowed Marxist throughout his career, and his political commitments consistently shaped his choice of subjects.

Luxembourg-born American photographer who began as a Pictorialist painter-photographer and became one of Stieglitz's closest collaborators at Gallery 291. After World War I, during which he directed aerial photography for the US Army, he abandoned fine-art photography for commercial work — becoming chief photographer for Condé Nast publications (Vogue and Vanity Fair) from 1923 to 1938. His celebrity and fashion portraits of the period are among the most formally accomplished commercial photographs ever made. Later in his career, as director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (1947–1962), he organized The Family of Man (1955), the most visited photography exhibition in history. He represents the most successful integration of modernist technique and mass commercial culture in the history of the medium.

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. He changed his name to Man Ray around 1912. He was active in the New York Dada scene before moving to Paris in 1921, where he became embedded in the Dada and Surrealist circles around Tristan Tzara and André Breton. He invented the Rayograph (cameraless photograph) in 1922 and developed the solarization technique with his partner and collaborator Lee Miller around 1929. He supported himself primarily through commercial fashion and portrait photography for magazines like Harper's Bazaar while pursuing his experimental work. He returned to the United States during World War II and spent his final decades between Los Angeles and Paris. His work spans photography, painting, sculpture, and film with equal formal invention in all media.

Born in Lenox, Massachusetts and self-taught as a photographer. He moved to Harlem in 1906 and opened his first photography studio there in 1916. Over the following five decades he produced a photographic archive of extraordinary scope — tens of thousands of images documenting every aspect of Black middle-class Harlem life: portraits, weddings, funerals, social organizations, sporting events, political gatherings, street scenes. He was also the official photographer of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. His work was virtually unknown outside the Black community until the Metropolitan Museum's 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind brought it to mainstream attention — when Van Der Zee was 83 years old. He continued working until his death at 96. His archive is now held by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

An international avant-garde art movement that emerged in Zurich, Switzerland around 1916 as a reaction against the catastrophe of World War I and the bourgeois rationalist culture that had produced it. Dadaists argued that conventional art — which they associated with the same cultural values that had produced the war — was morally compromised, and that the appropriate response was to mock, disrupt, and destroy artistic conventions rather than create new ones. Their methods included nonsense poetry, found-object assemblage, performance, and the deliberate embrace of accident and randomness as creative methods. After the war, Dada spread to Berlin, New York, and Paris, where it merged into Surrealism — a movement with related commitments but more interest in the unconscious mind and dream imagery as constructive rather than merely destructive alternatives to rationalism.

A photographic phenomenon in which a partially developed print or negative is exposed to light, causing partial reversal of tonal values — areas that should be dark become partially light, and a distinctive ghostly outline (the Mackie line) appears at the boundaries between light and dark areas. The technical name is the Sabattier effect. Man Ray and Lee Miller accidentally discovered its pictorial possibilities around 1929 when a light was accidentally turned on in the darkroom during development. Man Ray subsequently used the technique deliberately in many of his portraits, transforming the straightforward documentary photograph into something between document and dream. The solarized portrait became one of his most distinctive visual signatures.