291 After Stieglitz
Pigment prints from appropriated digital sources on uncoated paper, 2026
I sourced images of 291, Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, from museum collections, Wikimedia, and digitized issues of Camera Work. The images are exhibition views made by Stieglitz, documenting his arrangements of Pictorialist photographs, modernist sculptures, and African objects. In The Key Set, Sarah Greenough argues that Stieglitz understood these images as part of his photographic practice rather than as simple exhibition documents, calling them an “elaborate, short-lived still life” in which he “used the actual art of others as his raw material” (The Key Set, vol. 1, p. XXX).
Using Photoshop, I stripped the art objects from each image. What remains are the bare rooms of 291, reduced to empty pedestals, burlap walls, and dowdy curtains. Without the paintings and sculptures that cemented Stieglitz’s role as tastemaker, gatekeeper, and high priest of American modernism, the gallery reveals itself as a theater in which the Stieglitz myth and its players were staged.
