Published in The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz, co-authored with Anne McCauley, Volume 4 of the series “Defining Moments in American Photography,” edited by Anthony W. Lee, University of California Press, 2012.
The Prismatic Fragment: Looking into The Steerage
(an excerpt)
Free acts are exceptional.
—Henri Bergson
It is June 1907, on the liner Kaiser Wilhelm II, at port near Plymouth, England. A man in early middle age, well dressed and pensive—we will call him Stieglitz—leans against a railing at the forward end of the lower promenade deck, looking west toward the ocean just crossed. A capable, sometime photographer, he is cradling a camera. It is midday, unsparingly bright and duly warm. The voyage has forced a certain idleness upon him: a man of the leisure class, he is not by disposition a man of leisure. He is traveling neither quite for business nor for pleasure, though there will be episodes of both. Rather he is pulled from New York to Europe on the tides of an idiosyncratic career, and—we can surmise—his wife’s bourgeois petulance, which the European trip indulges and against which it offers a measure of escape. He has made a name for himself as an impresario for photography as a new art—an expressive art of high seriousness. As an artist in his own right, a writer, gallerist and publisher, he has made a vocation of his own temperamental antipodes—bombast and reticence, prognostication and advocacy, gallant arrogance and idealistic generosity. To look at him inferentially, as from a distance—and how else are we to know a man at the center of his own myth?—is to see someone at variance with himself: unorthodox and methodical in equal measures, occasionally innovative and consistently protective of the idea of innovation, imperious and impulsively anti-authoritarian. The downtime of the weeklong Atlantic passage has left him disagreeable, if relaxed, and the ship offers little escape from the time with himself.
The orlop deck of the ship’s bow that the photographer looks out on contains the steerage, the hold of the ship allocated for third-class passengers. What the photographer sees from the foredeck on which he stands is in fact only a small part of the steerage, most of which is below deck, extending deep into the ship’s hull. Windowless and claustrophobic, the steerage is quite unlike the ship’s staterooms and promenade decks, and the small section he sees—crowded with passengers enjoying fresh air—only intimates conditions below. Even at a glance, the steerage recalls the crowded, tenement-thick neighborhoods of the photographer’s own New York—the Lower East Side, The Bend, and the Fourth Ward—and their counterparts in other cities along the eastern seaboard and further west, in the interior of North America. Likewise, the people before him are recognizable as erstwhile inhabitants of these cities—destinations in the greatest labor migration in human history.
This photographer, looking into his camera, out at the scene before him, and back into his camera—what does he see? Then and there, what does he know? The particular distance separating himself and the third class passengers is about 50 feet, near enough to hear the crowd as a crowd but out of earshot of any individual. Even if he wants to, he cannot speak with them, and the burden of not speaking is shifted toward seeing—seeing as the echo of stories and voices cascading in the mind. Whence these stories, these voices? First of all, there are the articles appearing in the New York and national media on steerage-related issues—crowding, hygiene, food, medical care, the treatment of women, accidents, and generally grim conditions. These stories are one aspect of investigative journalism on immigration issues—health, hygiene and housing conditions, job safety, and the social and political implications of demographic shifts, which are among the central issues of the day. “I shall never forget the first meal I received on this boat,” writes the investigative reporter Kellogg Durland, traveling incognito in steerage in 1906 in order to describe the experience of a third-class passage:
“When my turn came to receive the dole [of food] I had to brace myself considerably… A hand soiled with all kinds of dirt—ship dirt, kitchen dirt and human dirt—pulled a great “cob” or biscuit out of a burlap sack and shoved it towards me. Then he snatched up a tin dipper and filled it with coarse red wine. As he handed this to me he sneezed—into the hand from which I had just taken my biscuit… I can, and did, more than once, eat my plate of macaroni after I had picked out the worms, the water bugs, and on one occasion a hairpin. But why should these things ever be found in the food served to passengers who are paying $36.00 for their passage?”
Likewise there is the New York Times’s sobering account of the findings of the Senate Immigration Commission’s investigation into conditions in steerage, particularly for women, as reported largely by undercover women agents:
“During these twelve days in the steerage I lived in a disorder and in surroundings that offended every sense. Only the fresh breeze from the sea overcame the sickening odors. The vile language of the men, the screams of the women defending themselves, the crying of children, wretched because of their surroundings, and practically every sound that reached the ears irritated beyond endurance….”
And perhaps, the memory also rings in his ears of the immigrant tailors who sought him out in his New York gallery only months before this trip, requesting his assistance in their struggle for better wages and working conditions—
“We understand you are interested in the working-class. In justice.”
“Well,” I said, “what is it I can do for you? What is it you want from me?” They said, “We’d like you to be an arbiter for us.”
Their request both flatters and corners him—can he deny that justice is on their side, or that pursuing justice is a duty for a man who preaches a high-minded dedication to truth in the name of art? But the self-fashioned nobility of his life’s work is at odds with social activism, and he refuses the request by way of an awkward promise—
“You will find many men who will plead your case for higher pay and shorter hours. You do not need me, but if ever you should come to me and say, ‘We refuse to work for anybody who will not let us give our best’,—I’ll be your leader. My life will belong to you.”
If he is less than convincing as a rhapsodist of the common man, failing to recognize that the tailors speak as proletarians, not artisans, his response signals an honest dilemma. Looking out over the steerage, contemplating distances, apprehending, lingering in the midst of half-grasped intentions—Stieglitz has found his way to an edge. Behind him is the bourgeois world in which his career and social standing are embedded, a world he largely detests, and before him—are “the people” not in any nationalistic, ethnic, historical, or creedal sense, but in a free and inadvertent collectivity of once and could-have-been Americans held together by need and unseen forces, and a quality of solitariness made manifold. Inasmuch as the crux of his own Americanness is a spirit of dissidence and refusal, he may well recognize his own solitariness in the combined solitudes of the scene before him. The steerage, as he encounters it, is a pent and spontaneous community, a place of desperation and determination undischarged onto any final shore. In orbits of closer and more distant empathy, his mind and his heart travel: his role is to circle, to round a recognition, to see a landscape, a cityscape, a shipscape whose surfaces are a rapid unsentimental education he identifies and does not fully understand, and more—to notice his own alienation as one position in that landscape, a counterpart to a dense anonymity. His share in the world before him is to know acutely—even if just for an instant, and even if knowing does not quite mean possessing it as an object of knowledge—that freedom for anyone on this ship glides within and not away from a more encompassing uncertainty.
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Here I am in the presence of images… images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed.
—Henri Bergson
Alfred Stieglitz makes a picture from his place above the steerage of the Kaiser Wilhelm II. The picture has an experiential origin—as all photographs do—in a photographer’s time with a camera, in this case an instrument of elegant design and superb versatility, used to make 4-by-5 inch negatives on glass plates. The Graflex: a leather-covered box, turtle-like when closed and crane-like when open. From behind a fitted frontside panel, the lens creeps forward by the turning of a small knob, lightly knurled for thumb and forefinger, a deliberated conveyance along a finely cut rack and pinion (Figure 1). The lens is the prized Goertz Double-Anastigmat (“Dagor”), 6 inches in focal length, exquisitely sharp and with a maximum aperture of f/6.8, which is to say wide enough make use of the Graflex’s other great advance, its fast shutter speeds—including twelve speeds between 1/100th and 1/1000th of a second.11 Deep within the mechanical body, shaded by its tall folding hood, is a finely ground glass on which the photographer sees a glowing play of shape, color, focus, and texture in constant motion. It is an engrossing phenomenon—a private spectacle in alluring, dimmed miniature, reversed left to right, its forms shifting endlessly. To photograph with this camera is, more than anything else, to intervene in this display, to make decisions about framing, timing, focus, and focal depth, and other instrumental concerns. If it is right to say that every camera naturalizes the audacious thought that a machine can transmogrify the world into a picture in the first place, the Graflex does so by its tacit suggestion that the world’s surfaces, resplendent on the ground glass, are graced and not betrayed in this act of intervention, which responds to their endless play by ceasing it.
In the picture Stieglitz makes, we look out across a distance to two decks of the steerage. Like a fugue, the image conveys the architecture of the ship by describing an elaborate counterpoint of line, volume, and tone. Across the picture’s width is a heavy beam, dark and slightly bowed as the picture gives it to us, dividing the composition in two. A gleaming gangway adorned with scalloping chains elaborates this division, emerging abruptly from the left, traverses the distance of the frame to the support beam. Other horizontal forms emerge—the bundled tarpaulin just below the beam, the brief lines of the sheeny metal steps at the far right of the picture, the dark boom extending across the sky, and its umbral twin, the mysterious black band across the picture’s bottom border.12 Against this horizontality are complementary vertical and nearly vertical elements that create a complex of trapezoids and triangles. The large mast is the largest of these upright diagonals. Its complement is the narrow, crescent-topped pole holding up the gangway, as well as the stanchions leaning to and fro on the gangway, the handrails of the metal staircase, and the many standing figures on both levels. The result is a formal organization that is all at once ponderous and weightless. The effect is of a massive structure suspended within the frame, attached (as it were) where the center beam touches the left and right edges. This beam becomes a kind of a pivoting axis on which the whole scene is liable to swing forward and backward into space, as if to mimic the lapping movements of the vessel.
Stieglitz’s depiction of the scene is, of course, a handling of photographic variables that are are also worth noting. There is the drawing of the lens—the specific proportionality, compression, and scale it yields—and also the moderately low contrastiness of its uncoated glass. There is the discrete depth of field (the amount of space in the world that appears to be in focus), which begins at approximately the plane marked by the capstan in the picture’s lower left corner and falls off just behind the row of figures standing at the middle railing. This moderately shallow depth of field renders the figures at the top of the frame less distinct individually and more continuous with one another, articulating them as a group or a mass both tonally and socially. The wide aperture that yields this particularly shallow depth of field demands a moderately fast shutter speed, which endows objects and figures with an added crispness, what I would call a certain optical alertness. My guess is that this fast shutter is Stieglitz’s technical priority. He is, after all, dealing with an organic, moving world—the passengers are themselves in motion, as is ship and the sea beneath him. A deep depth of field would be a moot choice if the entire picture were blurred from a slow shutter.13
If it is right to say that in the intricate design and formal organization Stieglitz studies how line, shape, volume, and tonality acquire the discrete solidities of the imagined objects themselves, the picture is equally a meditation on space in and around these solids, which is to say the implications of a vantage point that is not physically locatable in the scene depicted. It is as if we are perched or floating before what we see: space drops off precipitously in front of us, the view is both tightly cropped and oddly expansive, and the self-splitting of the composition creates a sense of peripheral vision. Or to put it differently, it is as if space—or whatever we are to call the volume of light bending outward from where we look—were itself a body in the picture, occupying the area between the (implied) vantage point and the ship’s objects and figures, “touching” them and us both.
This amplitude of distance seems in many ways to indicate the picture’s deep subject—namely, what distance as apartness might mean in this place, for this photographer, and for us as viewers. Of the figures we see—I count eighteen below the gangway, of which six are children, and at least thirty above the gangway, including at least one child—none is the protagonist or acts as a foil for the others. Distance itself mediates our encounter with these passengers: the picture has the effect of a reaching toward them, as if casting out a line of sight with no assurance that it quite reaches them, or can be relied on to catch or hold insight, much less knowledge.
If anything recuperates our (imagined) connection to these passengers, however tentative, it is that they themselves are in a state of waiting. In this steerage, at this moment (a moment that the photograph prolongs to infinity) they abide where past and future are held indefinitely in abeyance—marooned in a listless present. There is scant activity, no work, and little of what we would call leisure. These are migrants and expatriates, perhaps erstwhile pilgrims, seekers or ex-seekers, goal-setters and chance-takers, all returning to Europe for reasons and purposes that the picture does not reveal. Some may be making a round-trip as migrant workers; others may be among the large number of immigrants who returned to Europe—over one fifth of the arriving Eastern European Jews, over a third of Poles, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Greeks, and over half of the Italians, Hungarians and Slovaks.14 If we read the pictures as a study in power relations, its strong lateral division means that literally—and so metaphorically—we look down at these passengers of a “lower” social stratum and, at the same time, across to them as equals. We are positioned both “above” them and “with” them. The picture’s social understanding is as much horizontal as it is vertical—or rather, it is equally detached from both, with the result that the passengers we see are neither objectified nor subjectified. They are not social specimens meant to elicit paternalistic sympathies, nor members of notional communities to which we ourselves might belong or not belong. The picture presents them without origins and destinations, without nationality, language, occupation, or politics. We see no discernible bonds or lack of bonds between them, and the picture does not bend us toward hope, nostalgia, or grief and confesses no narrative of survival or of failure. One might say that it is a picture of diaspora—a picture of what dispersedness looks like, the condition between coming and going, quest and aftermath.
In short, if photographs are unique among objects of visual culture in being hungry for stories, hungry for connections to other photographs, hungry for analysis, hungry for autonomy from analysis, in this picture social testimony acquires the peculiar force of inconclusiveness. Seen “on its own”—one limited way among others of approaching it—the image offers a non-declamatory testimony of starts and suggestions that is appropriate for a subject that itself equivocates. The picture in effect is the equivalent of a language inadequate to describe how these passengers are at once “in”, “on,” and “of” this ship—neither captives of it nor free to roam it, neither sojourners nor inhabitants of the vessel, or of the undeclared places toward and away from which it moves. The picture’s formal exactitudes as Stieglitz renders it from the incessant play of form and light upon a ground glass, ultimately shows a “floating” world, and likewise inaugurates a floating, indeterminate reckoning.
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