The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alfred Stieglitz · a single exposure of 1907, made from an upper deck on a voyage from New York to Europe, looking down on the steerage below · photogravure, published in Camera Work no. 36 (1911) and again as a larger photogravure in the review 291, nos. 7 and 8 (1915) · the work scored is the image as Stieglitz published it in photogravure, the Camera Work plate of 1911, with the larger gravure of 1915 counted as the same image in a second edition; the edition, not any single impression, is the work
Mode
Straight photography from a hand camera: a found scene composed in the instant, sharp and unmanipulated, by the leader of pictorialism
Mythos
The ship as a world and a state, its classes stacked by its architecture; the voyage between old world and new; the division built, the voyage evoked and its arrival lent by misreading
Phase
One exposure of 1907, held back by the maker’s account for four years, published in photogravure in 1911 and again, larger, in 1915
Presentation
One frame, vertical, monochrome, from one exposure; photogravure, ink on paper, in two published editions
Register
Grave and still; observation rather than transport; tenderness below, an idle strangeness above
Scale
Two decks of one ship and the people on them; one instant
Governing Proposition
In 1907, on a ship bound from New York to Europe, Alfred Stieglitz looked down from an upper deck and made one exposure of what lay below: a lower deck crowded with steerage passengers, a white gangway crossing between the two levels on a diagonal, a stair at the right, a funnel or mast leaning at the upper left, and on the upper deck a young man in a pale straw hat leaning on the rail and looking down. The wager of the frame is that a ship is a society, its classes laid one above the other by its architecture, and that a document of that social fact and an arrangement of found shapes can be one and the same act of seeing.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Alfred Stieglitz (1864 to 1946) was an American photographer, the editor of Camera Work and the director of the gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. In 1907, on a voyage from New York to Europe, he made a single exposure from an upper deck of the ship, looking down on the steerage. The picture was published as a photogravure in Camera Work no. 36 in 1911, and again as a larger photogravure in the review 291, nos. 7 and 8, in 1915. By his own account he had held it back for four years before the first publication.
The work scored is the image as Stieglitz published it in photogravure: the Camera Work plate of 1911, with the larger gravure of 1915 counted as the same image in a second edition. The edition is the work, not any single impression of it. The image is one exposure, monochrome, in a vertical rectangle. Photogravure is ink printed from a plate, and it gave the picture a deep and even tonal scale and made it a print that a journal could publish and share, rather than a unique print for the gallery wall.
Stieglitz’s later account of how the picture was made is weighed as testimony about the image and is never part of it. His pictorialist work before it, and the rest of Camera Work, are context, and are not scored. The image has stood for 119 years since the exposure and 115 since its publication; how far the crop of the negative differs from the gravures, and how far the two gravures differ in tone, are not known with confidence and bear on nothing here.
Movement II
The upper deck takes roughly the top third of the frame and the lower deck the bottom half or more. Between them a white gangway, a raised walkway, crosses on a diagonal from the left edge toward the upper right. A stair descends at the right; a funnel or mast leans at the upper left. The gangway is the brightest shape in the picture, and it is the picture’s one decisive fact: take it away and the line that separates the two decks and the two classes is gone. Take away the funnel or mast and the diagonals of the gangway and the stair have nothing to answer them.
The gangway is a bridge that one class walks on and the other stands beneath. It is at once a shape in the composition and the boundary of a class, and that double office is the law of the whole frame: every form is either a line of the ship’s architecture or a body placed by it, and every person is above or below. Iron and domestic life, the chains at the gangway’s foot and the washing spread to dry, answer each other in one light. The law is clearest in the upper two thirds; at the crowded edges it loosens into the accidents of a found scene.
The vertical format stacks the decks and lets the gangway cut the frame. Painted, the scene would be a genre picture of emigrants, composed and therefore claimed. Photographed, it knows that these divisions were there, at that instant, in a real ship, and that the shapes were found and not imposed; that is its whole argument about modernism and about fact. The argument does not depend on the scale of the print: much of what the image knows survives a small, coarse reproduction, as its circulation has shown, and the form is required but not at every scale of its making.
Movement III
On the upper deck a young man in a pale flat straw hat leans on the rail and looks down, with other figures beside him. He is lit and idle. He is the picture’s watcher, and he stands where the photographer stood, among the watchers above. Take him away and the looking down goes out of the picture’s subject; with him, the upper deck looks down and the lower deck does not look up. The picture’s vantage is his, and so is its limit: the condition below is seen from above and from outside.
On the lower deck the steerage is crowded and domestic. A man’s back shows white suspenders crossing; there are women in shawls, a mother holding a child, washing hung or spread to dry, and iron machinery and chains at the gangway’s foot. All of it is shown with no pathos and no caption. Many of the figures are partly hidden, and no face below is given at length. The crowd at the lower left is a dense mass that the tones do not fully separate, and figures at the edges are cut awkwardly by the frame: the costs of a picture found rather than made.
The elevation is quiet. The white gangway against the dark mass of the lower deck has a real graphic force, and the gravure’s deep blacks and soft lights give the scene a gravity beyond a snapshot; there is tenderness below and a held strangeness above. But the picture holds one tone, grave and still, and its power works as recognition rather than as awe. Gursky’s Rhein II, a colder and emptier picture at 7.5, holds The Sublime at 7.5; this warmer and more human one holds it a tenth lower, at 7.4, and that tenth keeps it under the Universal Minimum.
Movement IV
The ship was bound from New York to Europe. The people on the lower deck were leaving America, not arriving, and the image has been widely and wrongly used as a picture of arrival. What the frame builds is the vertical division of a human world, an image as old as the ship of state, the ark and the ship of fools, made here from the structure of one real ship. What it evokes is the voyage, the crossing of water between old world and new, and the direction of that crossing has been supplied by the culture that reads it, against what it shows.
So the myth is built, but narrowly, and part of it is lent. The Archetypal Deep stands at 7.7: the division is load-bearing, the voyage is atmosphere, and the arrival is a misreading. The same misreading bears on what the picture discloses. A ship is a society, its classes laid one above the other by its architecture; that can be stated as true, and it holds. But much of what we would know of these people, where they were going and why, the image cannot tell, and its fame has filled the gap with an arrival that did not happen.
The questions that the image has borne for over a century turn on exactly these points. Is it a social document or a study in form, and can it be both? What does it mean that the photographer was above, looking down? What does the lasting misreading of its direction say about the way a nation wants its images? How far is Stieglitz’s own story of the making, told decades later, a myth fitted to the image? The depth is more in that debate than in the frame, whose formal reading, once seen, is complete.
Movement V
Stieglitz had led pictorialism, the soft focus, the gum and platinum printing, the photograph made to look like a painting or a drawing, through the Camera Club, the Photo-Secession and Camera Work. The Steerage turns from that premise to a sharp, unmanipulated, found image, composed in the instant from the forms of a real scene, with machinery and the poor as its subject and no softening. It was the leader of a movement turning from its own premise, and the plate appeared in his own journal. The wager was placed late, by his own account four years after the exposure; Lewis Hine was photographing the poor sharply at Ellis Island in the same years; and the decisive turn of the circle came in 1915 to 1917, with Strand.
The histories of photography mark the turn to straight modernist photography by this image, and Stieglitz’s own later work, Strand’s pictures in the last numbers of Camera Work and the American straight tradition through Weston and Evans stand in its line; much of its later reach is presence rather than redirection. Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, another founding image of the found photograph, stands level at 8.1: this one is older and more consequential for the turn, the other more perfectly composed. Lange’s Migrant Mother, at 8.4, is closer to its sitter, more fully disclosed and more archetypal, and The Steerage passes it on The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition alone.
The image survives whole in two gravure editions and many impressions, in stable ink on paper, with a presence continuous and wide. It holds class and the state, labour and migration, the family, the machine, the observer and history by implication in one structure, and leaves out the sacred, the inner life of anyone below and the natural order beyond a strip of light. The summit is closed to it by The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve, short of the Epochal Gate, and by The Sublime, a tenth under the Universal Minimum. It stands at 8.1, in Tier IV.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites on almost everything. Take away the gangway and the picture loses its one decisive fact: the line that separates the two decks and the two classes, and the brightest shape in the frame. Take away the straw hat and the upper deck has no watcher, so the looking down goes out of the picture’s subject. Take away the funnel or mast at the upper left and the diagonals of the gangway and the stair have nothing to answer them. Take away the crowd below and the bridge divides nothing. What yields is at the edges, where figures are cut by the frame, and in parts of the crowd whose places could be exchanged without loss. A found image cannot have the closure of a composed one.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated. A ship is a society, and its classes are laid one above the other by its architecture, with a bright walkway between that one class walks on and the other stands under. The upper deck looks down; the lower deck does not look up. The condition of the steerage, crowded and domestic, its washing in the open air, mothers holding children, is shown with no pathos and no caption. A second disclosure concerns the photograph: a document of a social fact and an arrangement of shapes can be one act of seeing. Held at 8.0 because the disclosure is made from above and outside: no face below is given at length, and the image’s fame has filled what it cannot tell with a misreading.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Elevation is present, and of a quiet kind. The white gangway against the dark mass of the lower deck has a real graphic force, and the gravure’s deep blacks and soft lights give the scene a gravity beyond a snapshot. There is tenderness below, in the mother and child and the washing, and a held strangeness above, where the watcher in the straw hat is lit and idle. But this is a picture of observation more than of transport. It holds one tone, grave and still, and does not rise again and again; its power works as recognition rather than as awe. The register and the single tone hold it at 7.4, lowest of the twelve after The Encompassed and a tenth under the Universal Minimum.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The ship is one of the oldest images of the world and the state: the ship of state, the ark, the ship of fools. Here the particular ship takes on that significance because its structure is the picture: above and below, the watchers and the watched, a bridge between two worlds that only one of them uses. That much is built. The voyage, the crossing of water between old world and new, is the other pattern, and it bears weight in the image’s life even where its direction has been mistaken. That is the limit: much of the archetype has been supplied by the culture’s reading, an arrival, rather than built by the picture, which shows a departure. Built, but narrowly, and partly lent.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The inheritance is the pictorialism Stieglitz himself had led: soft focus, gum and platinum printing, the photograph made to look like a painting or a drawing, championed through the Camera Club, the Photo-Secession and Camera Work. The departure is to a sharp, unmanipulated, found image, composed in the instant from the forms of a real scene, with modern subject matter, machinery and the poor, and no softening. The stake was real: the leader of a movement turning from its premise, in his own journal. What lowers the figure is how the wager was placed. By his own account he held the plate back four years; Lewis Hine was photographing the poor sharply at Ellis Island in the same years; and his circle’s decisive turn came only in 1915 to 1917, with Strand.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Substitute another form and much of the knowledge goes. As a painting the scene would be a genre picture of emigrants, composed and therefore claimed; the photograph knows that these divisions were there, at that instant, in a real ship, and that the shapes were found and not imposed. That is its whole argument about modernism and about fact. The vertical format stacks the decks and lets the gangway cut the frame. The photogravure carries the knowledge too: ink in a plate, a deep and even tonal scale, a print that could be published and shared in a journal rather than a unique exhibition print. Held below the high 8s because much of what the image knows survives a small, coarse reproduction, as its circulation proves.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: over a century of return, and the questions it has borne are real. Is it a social document or a study in form, and can it be both? What does it mean that the photographer was above, looking down? What does the lasting misreading of its direction, a departure taken for an arrival, say about the way a nation wants its images? How far is Stieglitz’s own story of the making, told decades later, a myth fitted to the image? What is straight photography when the crop and the gravure are chosen? Return to the plate yields too: the faces on the upper deck, the light on the hat, the faces below that look elsewhere. What holds the axis is that the formal reading, once seen, is complete.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American and European art photography of the 1900s and 1910s. Intrinsic force: a photograph that is at once a fact of society and an arrangement of modern forms, made by the leading pictorialist; a reorganisation of what an art photograph could be, from the made to the found. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the image by which the histories of photography mark the turn to straight modernist photography, and Stieglitz’s own later work, Strand’s pictures in the last numbers of Camera Work and the American straight tradition through Weston and Evans stand in its line. Discounted because the redirection belongs to the circle and to Strand as much as to one plate that waited four years, and because much of its later reach is presence, the image endlessly reproduced and often misread.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 119 years since the exposure. Form: whole. The image exists in two published gravure editions and many impressions; no single loss could take it. Presence: continuous and wide; it is among the most reproduced photographs of its century and is taught in every survey of the medium. Some of that presence is misreading, and fame is presence, not proof, which holds the figure off the top of its row. Fabric: photogravure is ink on paper, among the most stable photographic processes; impressions vary, and the charge is small. At this span the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1; wide presence and stable fabric put the image at the top of that band.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as command of the hand camera and of the photogravure. The making bears the load: the exposure caught at a moment when the straw hat, the gangway, the stair and the figures below fall into a structure; the vantage from the upper deck that sets the gangway on a diagonal and gives the picture its two worlds; the exposure holding the white of the walkway and the dark of the lower deck together. The gravure, made under Stieglitz’s eye, has a deep and velvety scale. What holds the axis is the found picture’s limits: figures cut awkwardly at the edges, the crowd at the lower left a dense mass that the tones do not fully separate, and a range of means narrower than a painter’s.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the iron of the ship, the gangway, the chains, the funnel or mast, and the domestic life of the lower deck, the washing, the shawls, the child. They obey one law, the law of the divided structure, in which every form is either a line of the ship’s architecture or a body placed by it, and every person is above or below. The gangway is at once a shape in the composition and the boundary of a class; the shapes of the machinery and the forms of the people answer each other in the same light. Nothing in the frame breaks the law. What holds the axis is the narrowness of the field, one deck, one instant, one division, and the loosening of the law at the crowded edges.
Score: 8.3 / 10
For a single photograph the orders held are many, and the ship’s architecture integrates them. Class and the state, in the division of decks and in the category of steerage itself, set by law and by fare. Labour and migration, in the people below, travelling as workers travel. The family, in the mothers and children and the domestic work done in the open. The machine, in the ship, its iron and its chains. The observer and the image, in the watchers above and the photographer among them. History by implication, in the great migrations of the years before 1914. What is absent is the sacred order, the inner life of anyone below and the natural order beyond a strip of light; this is the lowest of the twelve, and it is high for the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then Pressure on Tradition at 8.5, then The Living Form and The Made at 8.4. An image whole in two gravure editions and many impressions, its presence continuous and wide; the image by which the histories mark photography’s turn from the made to the found; a form that knows its divisions were there and found, not imposed; and an instant held from above in which hat, gangway, stair and crowd fall into one structure.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: many orders held for a single photograph, but no sacred order, no inner life below and no natural order beyond a strip of light. Then The Sublime at 7.4: one tone, grave and still, recognition rather than awe. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.7: the division of a world built, the voyage only evoked, and its arrival lent by a misreading.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls short by two tenths, The Unconcealment at 8.0 by five tenths and The Archetypal Deep at 7.7 by eight tenths. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.4, a tenth below 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Three of the five summit conditions are met, the Necessity Cap, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The twelve sum to 97.6, an average of 8.13 that displays 8.1, in the band of Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the photograph Alfred Stieglitz (1864 to 1946) made in 1907 on a voyage from New York to Europe, and of how it was published and received; from memory of the photogravure and its standard reproductions, not from an impression in hand. The work scored is the image as Stieglitz published it in photogravure: the plate in Camera Work no. 36 (1911), with the larger photogravure in the review 291, nos. 7 and 8 (1915), counted as the same image in a second edition. The edition, not any single impression, is scored; the variation between impressions bears on The Imperishable alone. Stieglitz’s later account of the making is weighed as testimony about the image, never as part of it; his pictorialist work before it and the rest of Camera Work are context, and are not scored. No words of Stieglitz’s are quoted, and his account is not drawn on for any credit. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the name of the ship, the port and month of the voyage, the class in which he travelled and with whom, the month of the 1911 issue, the paper of the 1915 edition, the camera and the size of the plate, the dimensions of the two gravures, the museums that hold impressions and where the negative is kept, the title and date of publication of his account of the making, which historians of photography mark the turn by it, the story that he had a single plate left, the number of figures in the frame, the crop of the negative against the gravures and how far the two gravures differ in tone.