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Dimensions: 38.7 x 28.8 cm (15¼ x 11 3/8 in.)
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Provenance: Gift of the photographer to Heinrich Kühn and thence by descent.
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Literature: Other prints of this image illustrated Greenough, S., Washington 2002, pp. 50-53, cat. nos. 83-87.
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Notes: This photograph was made at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 35th Street, near the headquarters of the Society of Amateur Photographers, of which Stieglitz was a member. The photographer took as his tool the hand camera, regarded by many at the time as unworthy of the 'serious worker', and waited for three hours in a fierce snowstorm on 22nd February 1893. He later recalled how 'upon having the negative I showed it to some of my colleagues. They smiled and advised me to throw away such rot. "Why it isn't even sharp and he wants to use it for enlargement!"' ("The Hand Camera - Its Present Importance", in The American Annual of Photography and Photographic Times Alamanc for 1897, New York 1896). Stieglitz argued that his hand camera negatives were made expressly for enlargement and that only rarely was more than part of an original shot used.
The original negative of this image was in landscape format. As a positive print it appears in a number of different formats and croppings, both portrait and landscape. The print offered here is unsually large in size, and in this as well as in its cropping resembles most closely the carbon print in the collection of the National Gallery of Art Washington (ref 1949.3.94 [124D]). The Gallery's catalogue entry for this observes that the railroad ties, visible in the lower left corner in previous printings of the image, are no longer seen. It is believed that the original negative was retouched at some point between the publication of Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies (1897), and the publication of Scribner's Magazine (November 1899), when the image first appeared without the railroad ties. The present print is believed to date from the late 1890s. The many transformations of Winter - Fifth Avenue demonstrate Stieglitz's intention to draw out the aesthetic potentials of photography. Through his attempts to push photographic technique beyond its accepted limits, he sought to educate the camera clubs and societies of America into a 'European' passion for and belief in the art of photography.
