The history of modern American art during the first part of the twentieth century, perhaps even the history of modern art itself in this country, might have been very different if Alfred Stieglitz had not existed. He was, at various times and sometimes all at once, a photographer, connoisseur, gallery director, publisher, collector, curator, promoter, and missionary for modernism, both American and European. Stieglitz was obviously one of those indispensable figures who appears in the right place at the right time and has a dramatic effect, yet the very complexity of his involvement with New York’s small avant garde, during its formative years, makes it hard to bring him into focus. He is a shape-changer.

For anyone concerned with the establishment of photography as an independent art form, the name Stieglitz is inextricable from the progressive group known as the Photo-Secessionists and even more inextricably (and specifically) connected to an iconic 1907 photograph of immigrants crowded into the steerage section of a ship and to moody, poetic images of the Flatiron Building; the name is linked, as well as to the forward-looking magazine he published, Camera Work. For anyone with a modicum of interest in the evolution of American modernism or in the way advanced European and American art was introduced to New York audiences, Stieglitz is synonymous with the succession of adventurous galleries with a confusing series of changing names that he directed from 1905 to 1946. For feminists, his long relationship with their heroine Georgia