The Steerage (1907): Art, History and Details

The Steerage (1907) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

With his camera, Stieglitz transformed a scene of impoverished immigrants returning to Europe into a study in shape and form; the image sparked his evolution from a pictorialist into a modernist. Reflecting on his career in 1942, Stieglitz proclaimed this image, taken in 1907, as an achievement of modern art that anticipated Cubism.

Object facts

• Title: The Steerage
• Date: 1907
• Creator attribution: Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: photogravure
• Dimensions: Image: 32 x 25.7 cm (12 5/8 x 10 1/8 in.); Image with black margin: 33.2 x 26.5 cm (13 1/16 x 10 7/16 in.); Paper: 40 x 27.9 cm (15 3/4 x 11 in.); Mounted: 50.8 x 38 cm (20 x 14 15/16 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 1900-1950
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2019.22

A detail from the museum

This print is Alfred Stieglitz’s own, lifelong copy of The Steerage, one of his most important works.

Collection credit

Gift of Diann G. Mann and Thomas A. Mann

Further reading listed by the museum

• Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, New York.
• Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present Day. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964.
• Norman, Dorothy, and Alfred Stieglitz. Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer. 1973.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.