From My Window at An American Place, Southwest 1932

Alfred Stieglitz made this gelatin silver print, "From My Window at An American Place, Southwest," in the early decades of the twentieth century. The photograph shows a view of buildings from a window in New York City, the city that, through institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, Stieglitz helped establish as a center of the art world. He lived and worked in a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization in the United States. The image depicts the modern urban landscape, including the construction of skyscrapers. These buildings changed the way people lived and worked, creating new social and economic structures. Stieglitz's work, like that of other modernists, reflects a focus on formal elements, such as line, shape, and composition. At the same time, it is very much about the social, political, and cultural forces that shaped the world around him. To fully understand a work like this, art historians often turn to publications, letters, exhibition reviews, and other primary source materials that can shed light on the artist's intentions and the work's reception in its own time.