Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 'The Steerage', photogravure on Japan paper, 1907, printed 1911

Black and white photograph showing segregation of poor men and women on lower deck of boat with bridge to upper deck for middle class people.

Gift of the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation

This is a proof of the photogravure that appeared in Camera Work 36 (October 1911), pl. 9.

The Steerage shows immigrants returning to their European homelands on the steerage level of the fashionable ship Kaiser Wilhelm II, the one which Stieglitz sailed to Europe in 1907.
Stieglitz recalled 'The scene fascinated me: A round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle. I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one another - a picture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vision that held me: simple people; the feeling of ship, ocean, sky; a sense of release that I was away from the mob called "rich." (Quoted in Norman, Dorothy. Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer. Middleton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1973 p. 76.).
The Steerage is the photograph Stieglitz said he would want to represent him if he could choose only one. He felt that this spontaneous photograph perfectly captured related shapes as well as human feelings.

E.906-2003