Back from the hols yesterday. I took "A Beginning Light" by Katherine Hoffman with me. It's a biography of Alfred Stieglitz, American photographer, dealing with his early years 1890 - 1917. He was instrumental in making photography the modern art form that we know it today. His work is beautifully lyrical, and is teaching me a lot about interpretation and composition, not least to really look at how the image is put together before the shutter is pressed. One of my favourite quotes of his is "Nearly right is child's play". Probably his best known image is "The Steerage" (1907). His early work comprised a lot of what we would call today street photography, notably "Winter - Fifth Avenue" (1893) - left. Interestingly, the version of the image in the book has a pile of railway sleepers in the extreme bottom left corner, which Stieglitz brushed out in the print shown here. Nothing new there, then.


Oh, and I did take loads of holiday snaps, all with the GF1, for which I now have a viewfinder. But that's for a future post.