[originaltext] You may remember that a few weeks ago we discussed the questi

You may remember that a few weeks ago we discussed the question of what photography is. Is it art or is it a method of reproducing images? Does photography belong to a museum or just in our homes? Today I want to talk about a person who tried to make his professional life an answer to such questions. Alfred Stieglitz went from the United States to Germany to study engineering. While he was there he became interested in photography and began to experiment with his camera. He took pictures under conditions that most photographers considered too difficult. He took them at night, in the rain and of people and objects reflected in windows. When he returned to the United States he continued this revolutionary effort. Stieglitz was the first person to photograph skyscrapers, clouds and views from an airplane. What Stieglitz was trying to do in his photographs was what he tried to do throughout his life—make photography an art. He thought that photography could be just as beautiful a form of self-expression as painting or drawing. For Stieglitz, his camera was his brush. While many photographers in the later 1800s and early 1900s thought of their work as a reproduction of identical images, Stieglitz saw his as creative art form. He understood the power of the camera to capture the moment. In fact he never retouched his prints or made copies of them. If you are in this class from today, I’m sure you’d say: Well, painters don’t normally make extra copies of their paintings, do they?