From My Window at An American Place, North

In the late 1920s Stieglitz photographed New York from his apartment on the thirtieth floor of the new Shelton Hotel, and from his seventeenth-floor gallery, An American Place, at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue. Although he had been photographing the city since the 1890s, these new spaces provided him with his first opportunity to photograph from such heights on a regular basis. Like his extensive Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe and his Equivalents, Stieglitz also conceived his late city views as a serial project; he produced ninety cityscapes between 1927 and 1937, when he gave up photography. In contrast to his earlier views of New York, which were inspired by a painterly European aesthetic, the pictures from this new series are hard-edged and virtually unpopulated. Like the gallery from which they were made, which promoted Americanness in art, these photographs of the quintessential modern American city exemplified a pure American aesthetic.