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Amanda Krause

AP Art History

Mrs. Quimby

January 25, 2019

“‘The Steerage’ (#127)”

The photograph The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz was shot in 1907 and is 33.5 cm by 26.4

cm. This picture was taken when Alfred and his wife and daughter were on board the Kaiser

Wilhelm II on their way to Paris and depicts the poorest travelers on the ship. He had grown up in

the middle-class, while his wife had spent her childhood in the upper-class and enjoyed luxury.

Alfred felt out of place as they were staying in the upper-class quarters of the ship. Due to this

discomfort, he escaped to the end of the deck where he saw men, women, and children huddled

in the steerage. As the son of German Jewish immigrants, he saw himself in these travelers and

wanted to join them. He noticed the ship’s architecture and the framing effect of the ladders,

sails, and steam pipes and how they related to each other. He raced down to his cabin to retrieve

his camera, hoping none of the people had moved, or the relationship of the shapes would have

been disturbed and the picture lost. It symbolizes the deepest human feeling and functions to

show the social divisions of society and photography as a fine art. It calls for a more complex

view of photography that can accommodate and convey abstraction. He is often criticized for

overlooking the subjects of this photograph, however, he points out that the photograph conveys

a message about the subjects; depicting rejected immigrants or those who were returning to their

home to see their relatives and to urge them to return to the United States with them. While he

was sympathetic to new immigrants, he was also opposed to admitting the uneducated to the U.S.
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This may explain his preference to avoid addressing the subject of the picture, so the audience

would see him arguing for photography as a fine art instead of a political statement.