ALFRED STIEGLITZ:The Terminal, 1893
In the hands of a perceptive person, the camera possesses a unique power: It is a matchless recorder of moments, of people and of place; it can reproduce the past with a fidelity no other medium can match. The classic photograph at right by Alfred Stieglitz demonstrates this power. For even the most casual viewer, the picture revives at once the look and feel of life in lower Manhattan during the 1890s. For a moment we are made part of a world of horse-drawn streetcars, antique streetlamps and gentlemen in bowler hats-a world that time and change have now erased in almost every detail. Not only does the genius of Stieglitz permit us a glimpse of the dress, architecture and city transit of a departed era, but it enables us to share a precise and personal moment in the photographer's own life.
Stieglitz made the picture during his first lonely months back in New York after nine years of living and studying abroad. He later recalled the circumstances: "There was snow on the ground. A driver in a rubber coat was watering his steaming horses. There seemed to be something closely related to my deepest feeling in what I saw, and I decided to photograph what was within me. The steaming horses, and their driver watering them on a cold winter day; my feeling of aloneness in my own country, amongst my own people .... " Today all these things still are contained in a moment marvellously preserved three quarters of a century ago.
Like the Stieglitz print, every photograph ever made freezes an image of something as it appeared at one instant in time. The pictures on the following pages demonstrate the power of the photograph to capture such fleeting moments-fragments of history, human faces and emotions, the look of an industrial town in New Jersey or a lonely hotel room in Maine-and to retain them virtually forever.
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