The Steerage

Date

1907

Creator

Stieglitz took this photograph in spring of 1907, when he and his family sailed to Europe, where he planned ambitious rounds of meetings and exhibitions. They embarked at New York to sail to Bremen aboard the S.S. Kaiser Wilhelm II. Sometime after the third day out, Stieglitz later wrote, he was strolling along the upper deck, where his family was accommodated in a first-class storeroom, when he came upon a remarkable view down into steerage, where economy passengers traveled together. The inclining mast and loading boom, a white-painted gangway bridge, and other elements of navel architecture contained a bustling city in itself. "I stood spell-bound for a while, looking and looking...," Stieglitz later wrote. "I saw a picture of shapes and underlying the feeling that I had about life." He rushed back to his cabin to get his handheld 4 x 5 inch Auto-Graflex camera. He had just one prepared glass plate but was able to expose it before the scene had shifted too much. from Acton, A History of Photography at the University of Notre Dame: Twentieth Century (Notre Dame, 2019)