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Tariq Zaidi
Tariq Zaidi
Tariq Zaidi

Tariq Zaidi

Country: United Kingdom

Tariq Zaidi is a freelance photographer currently based out of London, UK. In January 2014, he gave up an executive management position to pursue his passion of capturing the dignity, strength and soul of people, within their environment. His photography focuses on documenting social issues, inequality, traditions and endangered communities around the world.

Tariq's stories, images and videos from Afghanistan, Angola, Brazil, Cambodia, Chad, DRC, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Georgia, Haiti, Indonesia, Mongolia, North Korea, Republic of the Congo & South Sudan have been featured internationally in over 900 magazines / newspapers / websites (in more than 90 countries) including The Guardian, BBC, CNN, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Der Spiegel, El Pais Semanal, Geo, Independent On Sunday, National Geographic Traveler, GQ, Marie Claire, Vogue, GQ Style, Esquire, PDN, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 Mois, Telegraph, Conde Nast Traveler, Global Times China, Internazionale, Feature Shoot, China Daily, People's Daily, China, Deutsche Welle, Das Erste/ARD, Hindustan Times, Newsweek, Foreign Policy Magazine and Times of London among other respected international titles.

Tariq has won many major international photography awards (POYi, UNICEF, NPPA, PDN, IPA, AI-AP, AAPA etc). His work has been shown in 80 international exhibitions and he has worked on projects and assignments in 21 countries across 4 continents. He is a self-taught photographer, holds an M.Sc. (Master of Science) from University College London and is an Eddie Adams Worksop 2015 Alumini.

In Feb 2018, Tariq was awarded one of the Premier Awards in POY75 (Pictures of the Year International Competition) - "Photographer of the Year" Award of Excellence for his work from North Korea, Congo and Brazil and also for 2nd place in the Feature Category in the same year. He was also a winner of PDN Photo Annual 2018 (Photojournalism / Documentary Category) and was awarded The Marty Forscher Fellowship Fund for outstanding achievement in Humanistic Photography, presented by PDN and Parsons School of Design, USA. In 2019, he was nominated to the Prix Pictet. In 2020, his work from Congo, El Salvador and Georgia was recognised 5 times by POY77 (Pictures of the Year International Competition) including 1st place for Portraits Series, 2nd place Spot News and 3rd Place Issue Reporting. His work from El Salvador has also been honoured as a 2020 Amnesty International Media Awards finalist (Photojournalism category) in recognition of his commitment to human rights. In Sep 2020, Tariq's work entitled Sapeurs: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congo was shown at Visa Pour L'image, International Festival of Photojournalism.

Tariq is currently working on a long-term personal project entitled Capturing the Human Spirit - a visual anthology about hope, dignity and community in some of the poorest regions in the world. The first 3 chapters of this work from the slum communities of Haiti, Brazil and Cambodia was featured at Visa Pour L'image, International Festival of Photojournalism, in September 2018.

His first book Sapeurs: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congo was published in September 2020.

Articles

Tariq Zaidi's Exclusive Interview
Sin Salida
Cattle of Kings - The Mundari of South Sudan
Sapeurs
North Korea The People's Paradise

All about Photo Compeitions

All About Photo Awards 2018
All About Photo Awards 2022
All About Photo Awards 2023
Selected Books on Available on Amazon
Tariq Zaidi: North Korea The People’s Paradise
Tariq Zaidi: North Korea The People’s Paradise
Tariq Zaidi
Sin Salida
Sin Salida
Tariq Zaidi
Sapeurs: Ladies & Gentlemen of the Congo
Sapeurs: Ladies & Gentlemen of the Congo
Tariq Zaidi

Websites

www.tariqzaidi.com

@tariqzaidiphoto

 

Tariq Zaidi's Video

Selected Books

Tariq Zaidi: North Korea The People’s Paradise
Tariq Zaidi: North Korea The People’s Paradise
Tariq Zaidi
Sin Salida
Sin Salida
Tariq Zaidi
Sapeurs: Ladies & Gentlemen of the Congo
Sapeurs: Ladies & Gentlemen of the Congo
Tariq Zaidi

Inspiring Portfolios

Marijn Fidder
© Marijn Fidder
Julien Chatelin
© Julien Chatelin
Marcus Yam
© Marcus Yam
Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry
© Patrick Enssler
 
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Rania Matar
Rania Matar
Lebanon/United States
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Matar's work has been widely published and exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, in a solo exhibition: In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar She has received several grants and awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition. Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide. So far, she has published the following books: L'Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009, and more recently, SHE, 2021. She is currently an associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. SHE: As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, my background and cross-cultural experiences inform my art. I have dedicated my work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood - both in the United States where I live and the Middle East where I am from - in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality, within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences. In my continuous exploration of what it is like to be a girl and a woman today, in a world that poses endless questions on girls and women of all backgrounds, I am focusing in this project on young women in their late teens/early twenties. They are the ages of my daughters - they are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality they are often not prepared for, a humbling reality most often harder than they expected and less glamorous than what is portrayed on social media. Whereas in A Girl and Her Room, I photographed young women in relationship to the curated and controlled environment of their bedrooms, I am photographing them here in the larger environment they find themselves in after they leave home, the more global backdrop that now constitutes their lives in transitions. I want to portray the raw beauty of their age, their individuality, their physicality, their mystery, and the organic relationship they create with their environment, being in the lush landscapes of rural Ohio, or the textured backdrops of Beirut. I want to photograph them, the way I, a woman and a mother, see them: beautiful, alive. I want to create a personal narrative with them. The process is about collaboration and empowerment, and the photo session always evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process. My work addresses the states of 'Becoming' - the beauty and the vulnerability of growing up - in the context of the visceral relationships to our physical environment and universal humanity. By collaborating with women in the United States and in the Middle East - and while still looking to reveal the individuality of each young woman - I focus on our essence, our physicality and the commonalities that make us human, ultimately highlighting how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines. Find out more about Becoming
Claudio Allia
Claudio Allia
Italy
1962
Claudio Allia (1962), is an Ophthalmologist, jazz and classical music producer, and an amateur awards-winning photographer living in Sicily. Music and photography have always been his main passions that he has cultivated all his life since childhood. Fascinated by fine art and conceptual photography, at early 90's Claudio began to devote himself to the creation of photographic projects and series trying to transfigure and filter most disparate social themes, even the most crude and brutal, through his personal sensitivity and imagination. Since 2005, started to experiment with new visual and creative approaches into his photographic world, exploring and developing as well his knowledges in the digital editing field and spacing his body of work from fine art to surrealistic or conceptual photo collections/series up to pure social/documentary photography. Slum Glam series Despite the harsh living conditions I have recognised the high level of dignity shown by the Mathare residents and my Slum Glam series attempted to depict this. A hand painted, makeshift wooden chair rests in front of a multi coloured shack wall that the women have decorated using brightly coloured designs wearing their best clothes to pose for my camera. Flower Pots series (Mathare Valley Slum - Nairobi) "Now we go into the vulnerable realm of an impossible privacy, constantly threatened and modified by all that's happening outside; rooms as decorated trenches of a never-ending battle; 9 square meters where to try a claustrophobic but worthy independence, where to keep dignity at low cost. Now focus in the flowerpots; the picture is a transparent flowerpot allowing you to check every corner of these rooms... look again: the dwellers are the flowers." --Claudio Torres Remote Control series (Mathare Valley Slum – Nairobi) For the Remote Control series some of the children of Mathare joined me on a photo shoot, turning up well dressed and carrying a favourite, or only toy. As they walked through the area of corregated dwellings I handed them a remote control i had brought withme in preparation and they instinctively grasped the significance and started pointing it towards areas that they wished to see change to improve their existence.
Tom Price
Tom Price
Wales
1985
Tom Price is an award-winning photographer, filmmaker and writer based in east London, with over a decade of experience working on commercial, editorial and not-for-profit projects for organisations such as the NHS, Airbnb and Save the Children. His work focuses on telling important stories and highlighting social phenomena - previous short-form projects have ranged from documenting the largest dance festival in the world to critical humanitarian crises, such as food insecurity in South Sudan and typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. His work has been exhibited in Latin America, Europe and the USA; projected onto the side of the Tate Modern in London and presented at the UN headquarters in New York. Recently, he has exhibited at Helsinki Photo Festival 2021, Berlin Photo Week 2021, and was awarded first place and 'photographer of the year' at All About Photo awards 2021, 1st place International Photo Awards 2021 and longlisted for the BBA Photography Prize, Berlin. Exclusive Interview with Tom Price The Stunning Winning Images of All About Photo Awards 2021
Thomas James Parrish
Thomas James Parrish
Australia
1993
Based in Sydney, Thomas is an Australian photojournalist and travel photographer driven by a passion for exposing and championing environmental and humanitarian issues that exist in today’s societies, all over the world. Thomas’ work explores current social issues; combining his passion for creative storytelling with a desire to inspire positive social change. Working closely with local NGOs, charities and communities, this work has taken him across the world where he has founded projects and campaigns with refugees, religious groups, environmental agencies and education programs. His photographic journey began in 2016 when he spent 6 months documenting the north of India as part of his project ‘Oh India’ which, after first being released as an exhibition in Sydney, has since become a photobook and has raised over $10,000 for a remote education program in West Bengal. In 2017 Thomas travelled across Italy documenting the refugee crisis, working closely with volunteer groups and NGOs to tell the stories of those seeking asylum for his ongoing project ‘A Voice for a Refugee’. After spending a year studying at the Speos International Photographic Institute in London in 2018/19 and obtaining his diploma in professional photography, Parrish then went on to document the Camino del Norte, an 850km pilgrimage across Spain, as a way of raising money through sponsorship and prints sales for Amazon Watch as part of his project ‘Camino for the Amazon’ which aided in the recovery program for indigenous communities most affected by the fires in the Amazon in 2019, raising over $4,000. Thomas has since returned home to Australia where he recently released his latest body of work ‘A Place Called Manly, A Place Called Home’, which celebrates the everyday beauty of his hometown in Sydney Australia and was exhibited in Paddington, Sydney. Thomas’s work has featured in multiple international photographic publications such as Suitcase Magazine, Lodestars Anthology, Australian Photography Magazine, Dodho Mag, Stade and Ernest Journal and more. Statement “With my work I try to emphasise our responsibility as humans to care for the world, and to express the importance of identity, through engaging storytelling. I hope I ensure a positive impact for humanity and the natural world and that my photographs can act as an instrument for inspiration and change.”
Lauren Stewart
Lauren Stewart
United States
1983
Lauren Stewart is a self-taught American documentary & street photographer. She graduated from the College of Charleston in 2005 with a degree in English. From 2017 to 2019 she lived in and traveled through China, Nepal, India and Thailand where she covered South East Asia. Her work focuses on documenting people’s daily lives to make global cross-cultural connections between the viewer and the subject. Her work has appeared in numerous international publications such as Suitcase Magazine, Electrify Magazine, Matador Network, NR Magazine as well as others. She was selected to be a part of the inaugural Women Street Photographers exhibit in 2018 in New York City and was also a finalist in the WSP exhibitions in 2019 and 2024. Her work has also been included in the PHOS Street Photography Days Exhibition in Bulgaria in 2018 and most recently in PHOTO SC’s Feminism exhibition in Columbia, South Carolina in 2024. She currently lives in the United States with her family while working on both street photography as well as long-term documentary projects revolving around the culture of the American South.
Vytenis Jankūnas
Vytenis Jankūnas
United States
1961
Vytenis Jankūnas is a Lithuanian-American artist who in his latest work uses mostly photography as a medium for his artistic projects, which include books, photo and video installations. He has shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Recent exhibits include one-man shows at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (Lithuania) (his second solo show in CAC Vilnius), Tallinn Art Hall Gallery, (Estonia), Undercurrent Gallery, New York City (USA) and Prospekto Gallery, Vilnius (Lithuania). He won the 1st place in Self Published Books category of the IPA - int'l photography awards, has been a recipient of the Fellowship award from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York City (USA) and was awarded a residency at Nordic Arts Centre (HIAP), Helsinki (Finland). Vytenis Jankūnas lives and works in New York City, USA. Urban Portraits - NYC Edition My latest photography project is called ''Urban Portraits - NYC Edition.'' I have lived in New York City for over 25 years and always been asking myself: what keeps me here for so long? Is it cultural richness, or the career opportunities this city can offer, or maybe the ability to experience most of what the world can offer without leaving the city? I guess everything at once, but one thing became certain to me: I fell in love with the people, the way they look, the way they dress, the way they talk. It is hard to find another city in the world with such, or similar diversity within its population. This is what my project is about, just walking the streets and capturing people with my camera religiously. The result is something in between street photography and portraits of people in the vulnerable state of everyday life. It is still an ongoing project
Graeme Williams
Graeme Williams
South Africa
1961
I grew up in the whites-only suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa during the apartheid era when South African law decreed that 92% of the population were regulated to the status of second-class citizens. My interest in photography began at the age of twelve, but I soon realized that a Kodak Instamatic was never going to produce the results that I wanted. I worked for three years in a bookshop and eventually bought myself a Fujica ST701. It was a real thing of beauty; a single reflex camera with a basic zoom lens, that provided me with the means to control how light formed itself onto the surface of the silver halide film. Sunsets and silhouettes held my attention for a few months, but I had already begun to explore the complex tradition of photographic expression. Life Magazine was for me, at that time, the Holy Grail. Over the years, my enthusiasm for exploring the photographic medium has never diminished. My photographic momentum was temporarily diverted after school by parental pressure to obtain a 'proper' qualification. In my final school year, I was both the Dux scholar as well as a first-team sportsman, which resulted in me being offered a De Beers bursary to study Geology and Statistics at the University of Cape Town. After graduating, I broke the news to my unnerved parents that I was giving up this career path and instead of becoming a property photographer at the local newspaper. In the hierarchy of photographic jobs, this is very close to the bottom. My immediate aim was to gain access to unlimited amounts of film and the time to work on my own projects. In 1987 I began photographing a conscientious objector and medical doctor, Ivan Toms, who refused to comply with the apartheid government's military service requirements. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison. The essay highlighted the absurdity of the political system. Renowned photographer, David Goldblatt, took an interest in this work and this interaction led to a three-decade relationship in which he became both a mentor and a friend. The rights to my essay on Ivan Toms were bought by Life magazine the following year. Much of my work during this period was motivated by the desire to expose the social inequalities and racial divisions within my country. I eventually joined the strongly anti-apartheid collective, Afrapix, and later became a founding member and manager of the documentary collective, South Photographs. In 1989, the beginning of the end of apartheid was evident. I was eager to situate myself in a position that would afford me the best opportunities to witness the transition to democracy. I joined Reuters News Agency as a permanent stringer and for the next five years, I became immersed in the events, both violent and momentous, that led up to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994. Many of my photographs from this period have taken on a life of their own. The image of Nelson Mandela walking out of prison with his wife, Winnie, has been exhibited and published worldwide. In 2008, as Barack Obama fought John McCain for the presidency, Newsweek magazine ran a story asking each candidate to choose an image that best personified their worldview. Obama's team chose an image that I photographed in Thokoza township in 1991. Last year the same photograph became central in a high-profile image-appropriation dispute between me and New York artist, Hank Willis Thomas. There was a massive groundswell of support from colleagues and media from around the world. An amicable settlement was reached. Since 1994 I have concentrated on producing personalized and contemporary bodies of work that reflect this complex country and the continent as a whole. These essays have been shown in solo exhibitions in New York, London, Paris, Cape Town, and Johannesburg as well as numerous photo festivals around the world. (Including China, Singapore, Brazil, Cambodia, France, and the USA). I have been privileged to have been included in major international exhibitions showcasing contemporary South African photography; including Figures and Fictions at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, Apartheid and After at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, Earth Matters at the Smithsonian in New York, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid at the ICP in New York and Being There, at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Awards include the CAP Prize for Contemporary African Photography (Basel) in 2013 and the Ernest Cole Award (South Africa) in the same year. I have continued working on commissioned assignments and traveling to over fifty countries. My photographs have appeared on the cover of Time magazine twice, and have been published in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Newsweek, Stern, and many others. Whilst working on my long-term projects, I try to bear in mind how the work will be exhibited and published. So, therefore, during the planning and photographing stages, I attempt to create a broad context for my essays, that includes a general look and feel while creating the space for each image to convey its individual complexity. This need to develop a dual awareness in my personal work has benefitted me from a long-term interest in designing and producing photobooks. I have created over 20 publications, some of them winning awards and many being shortlisted in dummy book competitions. During the past five years, I have felt a need to shift my attention from South Africa to the American social, political, and physical landscape. Some of my motivations for this change in direction have been outlined within the 'Plan' document. In 2016 I was granted a residency in the US by the Ampersand Foundation, giving me an opportunity to develop a body of work that interrogated the social strata within the greater community of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I designed and produced a book called, Diverging Dreamlines that included, portraits, urban landscapes as well as multi-image, digital, illustrations. The publication was chosen as "best of the show" in the Annual Photobook Exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts. The work was also included in the Unmasked exhibition at Axis Gallery, New York in 2017. Earlier this year (2019) I co-presented a paper, Over Time, at the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) Congress held in London. Four of my personal essays were incorporated into the presentation, allowing a psychoanalytical exploration into the parallels between this photographic record and South Africa's dynamics and process of change. I have participated in various mentorship programs, supporting students from South African photographic institutions: Tierney Fellowship winners from the University of the Witwatersrand (2018/2019) and the Market Photo Workshop (2015/2016). As well as candidates from the Photographer incubator Program in 2016. Learn more about Graeme Williams on videos: Victoria and Albert Museum Photography and Democracy South African Studios Dwell in Possibility opening Check out Graeme Williams's interview about his latest project America Revisited
Anatole Bolkov
Anatole Bolkov
Russia
1970
Anatole Bolkov is a street and portreture photographer based in Moscow whose work explores the hidden poetry of ordinary people and everyday life. With a keen eye for the ambiguous and the ephemeral, he captures the quiet chaos of urban existence, revealing the unseen narratives woven into the fabric of public spaces. His photography blurs the line between reality and perception, transforming ordinary moments into enigmatic visual stories. Statement: My photographic work revolves around human presence—not always obvious, but often hinted at through shadows, fleeting reflections, and transient encounters. I'm fascinated by the ambiguous—the half-glimpsed, the vaguely familiar, the eerily uncanny. I strive to reimagine the ordinary by framing it through a shifted perspective. My images move between color and monochrome, analogue and digital - each choice dictated by the emotional resonance I want to evoke. This interplay between clarity and mystery lies at the heart of my visual language. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 25
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz
United States
1864 | † 1946
Through his activities as a photographer, critic, dealer, and theorist, Alfred Stieglitz had a decisive influence on the development of modern art in America during the early twentieth century. Born in 1864 in New Jersey, Stieglitz moved with his family to Manhattan in 1871 and to Germany in 1881. Enrolled in 1882 as a student of mechanical engineering in the Technische Hochschule (technical high school) in Berlin, he was first exposed to photography when he took a photochemistry course in 1883. From then on he was involved with photography, first as a technical and scientific challenge, later as an artistic one. Returning with his family to America in 1890, he became a member of and advocate for the school of pictorial photography in which photography was considered to be a legitimate form of artistic expression. In 1896 he joined the Camera Club in New York and managed and edited Camera Notes, its quarterly journal. Leaving the club six years later, Stieglitz established the Photo-Secession group in 1902 and the influential periodical Camera Work in 1903. In 1905, to provide exhibition space for the group, he founded the first of his three New York galleries, The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which came to be known as Gallery 291. In 1907 he began to exhibit the work of other artists, both European and American, making the gallery a fulcrum of modernism. As a gallery director, Stieglitz provided emotional and intellectual sustenance to young modernists, both photographers and artists. His Gallery 291 became a locus for the exchange of critical opinions and theoretical and philosophical views in the arts, while his periodical Camera Work became a forum for the introduction of new aesthetic theories by American and European artists, critics, and writers. After Stieglitz closed Gallery 291 in 1917, he photographed extensively, and in 1922 he began his series of cloud photographs, which represented the culmination of his theories on modernism and photography. In 1924 Stieglitz married Georgia O'Keeffe, with whom he had shared spiritual and intellectual companionship since 1916. In December of 1925 he opened the Intimate Gallery; a month later Duncan Phillips purchased his first works from Stieglitz’s gallery, paintings by Dove, Marin, and O'Keeffe. In 1929 Stieglitz opened a gallery called An American Place, which he was to operate until his death. During the thirties, Stieglitz photographed less, stopping altogether in 1937 due to failing health. He died in 1946, in New York. The Collection contains nineteen gelatin-silver photographs of clouds by Stieglitz.Source: The Phillips Collection My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it. -- Alfred Stieglitz In early June 1918, O'Keeffe moved to New York from Texas after Stieglitz promised he would provide her with a quiet studio where she could paint. Within a month he took the first of many nude photographs of her at his family's apartment while his wife Emmy was away, but she returned while their session was still in progress. She had suspected something was going on between the two for a while, and told him to stop seeing her or get out. Stieglitz left and immediately found a place in the city where he and O'Keeffe could live together. They slept separately for more than two weeks, but by the end of July they were in the same bed together. Once he was out of their apartment Emmy had a change of heart. Due to the legal delays caused by Emmy and her brothers, it would be six more years before the divorce was finalized. During this period Stieglitz and O'Keeffe continued to live together, although she would go off on her own from time to time to create art. Stieglitz used their times apart to concentrate on his photography and promotion of modern art. O'Keeffe was the muse Stieglitz had always wanted. He photographed O'Keeffe obsessively between 1918 and 1925 in what was the most prolific period in his entire life. During this period he produced more than 350 mounted prints of O'Keeffe that portrayed a wide range of her character, moods and beauty. He shot many close-up studies of parts of her body, especially her hands either isolated by themselves or near her face or hair. O'Keeffe biographer Roxanna Robinson states that her "personality was crucial to these photographs; it was this, as much as her body, that Stieglitz was recording." In 1920, Stieglitz was invited by Mitchell Kennerly of the Anderson Galleries in New York to put together a major exhibition of his photographs. In early 1921, he hung the first one-man exhibit of his photographs since 1913. Of the 146 prints he put on view, only 17 had been seen before. Forty-six were of O'Keeffe, including many nudes, but she was not identified as the model on any of the prints. In 1922, Stieglitz organized a large show of John Marin's paintings and etching at the Anderson Galleries, followed by a huge auction of nearly two hundred paintings by more than forty American artists, including O'Keeffe. Energized by this activity, he began one of his most creative and unusual undertakings – photographing a series of cloud studies simply for their form and beauty. He said: "I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life – to show that (the success of) my photographs (was) not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone…" By late summer he had created a series he called "Music – A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs". Over the next twelve years he would take hundreds of photographs of clouds without any reference points of location or direction. These are generally recognized as the first intentionally abstract photographs, and they remain some of his most powerful photographs. He would come refer to these photographs as Equivalents. Stieglitz's mother Hedwig died in November 1922, and as he did with his father he buried his grief in his work. He spent time with Paul Strand and his new wife Rebecca (Beck), reviewed the work of another newcomer named Edward Weston and began organizing a new show of O'Keeffe's work. Her show opened in early 1923, and Stieglitz spent much of the spring marketing her work. Eventually, twenty of her paintings sold for more than $3,000. In the summer, O'Keeffe once again took off for the seclusion of the Southwest, and for a while Stieglitz was alone with Beck Strand at Lake George. He took a series of nude photos of her, and soon he became infatuated with her. They had a brief physical affair before O'Keeffe returned in the fall. O'Keeffe could tell what had happened, but since she did not see Stieglitz's new lover as a serious threat to their relationship she let things pass. Six years later she would have her own affair with Beck Strand in New Mexico. In 1924, Stieglitz's divorce was finally approved by a judge, and within four months he and O'Keeffe married in a small, private ceremony at Marin's house. They went home without a reception or honeymoon. O'Keeffe said later that they married in order to help soothe the troubles of Stieglitz's daughter Kitty, who at that time was being treated in a sanatorium for depression and hallucinations. For the rest of their lives together, their relationship was, as biographer Benita Eisler characterized it, "a collusion ... a system of deals and trade-offs, tacitly agreed to and carried out, for the most part, without the exchange of a word. Preferring avoidance to confrontation on most issues, O'Keeffe was the principal agent of collusion in their union." In the coming years O'Keeffe would spend much of her time painting in New Mexico, while Stieglitz rarely left New York except for summers at his father's family estate in Lake George in the Adirondacks, his favorite vacation place. O'Keeffe later said "Stieglitz was a hypochondriac and couldn't be more than 50 miles from a doctor." The great geniuses are those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience. -- Alfred Stieglitz At the end of 1924, Stieglitz donated 27 photographs to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was the first time a major museum included photographs in its permanent collection. In the same year he was awarded the Royal Photographic Society's Progress Medal for advancing photography and received an Honorary Fellowship of the Society. In 1925, Stieglitz was invited by the Anderson Galleries to put together one of the largest exhibitions of American art, entitled Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs, and Things, Recent and Never Before Publicly Shown by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Only one small painting by O'Keeffe was sold during the three-week exhibit. Soon after, Stieglitz was offered the continued use of one of the rooms at the Anderson Galleries, which he used for a series of exhibitions by some of the same artists in the Seven Americans show. In December 1925, he opened his new gallery, The Intimate Gallery, which he nicknamed The Room because of its small size. Over the next four years, he put together sixteen shows of works by Marin, Dove, Hartley, O'Keeffe and Strand, along with individual exhibits by Gaston Lachaise, Oscar Bluemner and Francis Picabia. During this time, Stieglitz cultivated a relationship with influential new art collector Duncan Phillips, who purchased several works through The Intimate Gallery. In 1927, Stieglitz became infatuated with the 22-year-old Dorothy Norman, who was then volunteering at the gallery, and they fell in love. Norman was married and had a child, but she came to the gallery almost every day. O'Keeffe accepted an offer by Mabel Dodge to go to New Mexico for the summer. Stieglitz took advantage of her time away to begin photographing Norman, and he began teaching her the technical aspects of printing as well. When Norman had a second child, she was absent from the gallery for about two months before returning on a regular basis. Within a short time, they became lovers, but even after their physical affair diminished a few years later, they continued to work together whenever O'Keeffe was not around until Stieglitz died in 1946. In early 1929, Stieglitz was told that the building that housed The Room would be torn down later in the year. After a final show of Demuth's work in May, he retreated to Lake George for the summer, exhausted and depressed. The Strands raised nearly sixteen thousand dollars for a new gallery for Stieglitz, who reacted harshly, saying it was time for "young ones" to do some of the work he had been shouldering for so many years. Although Stieglitz eventually apologized and accepted their generosity, the incident marked the beginning of the end of their long and close relationship. In the late fall, Stieglitz returned to New York. On December 15, two weeks before his sixty-fifth birthday, he opened An American Place, the largest gallery he had ever managed. It had the first darkroom he had ever had in the city. Previously, he had borrowed other darkrooms or worked only when he was at Lake George. He continued showing group or individual shows of his friends Marin, Demuth, Hartley, Dove and Strand for the next sixteen years. O'Keeffe received at least one major exhibition each year. He fiercely controlled access to her works and incessantly promoted her even when critics gave her less than favorable reviews. Often during this time, they would only see each other during the summer, when it was too hot in her New Mexico home, but they wrote to each other almost weekly with the fervor of soul mates. In 1932, Stieglitz mounted a forty-year retrospective of 127 of his works at The Place. He included all of his most famous photographs, but he also purposely chose to include recent photos of O'Keeffe, who, because of her years in the Southwest sun, looked older than her forty-five years, in comparison to Stieglitz's portraits of his young lover Norman. It was one of the few times he acted spitefully to O'Keeffe in public, and it might have been as a result of their increasingly intense arguments in private about his control over her art. Later that year, he mounted a show of O'Keeffe's works next to some amateurish paintings on glass by Becky Strand. He did not publish a catalog of the show, which the Strands took as an insult. Paul Strand never forgave Stieglitz for that. He said, "The day I walked into the Photo-Secession 291 [sic] in 1907 was a great moment in my life… but the day I walked out of An American Place in 1932 was not less good. It was fresh air and personal liberation from something that had become, for me at least, second-rate, corrupt and meaningless." In 1936, Stieglitz returned briefly to his photographic roots by mounting one of the first exhibitions of photos by Ansel Adams in New York City. The show was successful and David McAlpin bought eight Adams photos. He also put on one of the first shows of Eliot Porter's work two years later. Stieglitz, considered the "godfather of modern photography", encouraged Todd Webb to develop his own style and immerse himself in the medium. The next year, the Cleveland Museum of Art mounted the first major exhibition of Stieglitz's work outside of his own galleries. In the course of making sure that each print was perfect, he worked himself into exhaustion. O'Keeffe spent most of that year in New Mexico. In early 1938, Stieglitz suffered a serious heart attack, one of six coronary or angina attacks that would strike him over the next eight years, each of which left him increasingly weakened. During his absences, Dorothy Norman managed the gallery. O'Keeffe remained in her Southwest home from spring to fall of this period. In the summer of 1946, Stieglitz suffered a fatal stroke and went into a coma. O'Keeffe returned to New York and found Dorothy Norman was in his hospital room. She left and O'Keeffe was with him when he died. According to his wishes, a simple funeral was attended by twenty of his closest friends and family members. Stieglitz was cremated, and, with his niece Elizabeth Davidson, O'Keeffe took his ashes to Lake George and "put him where he could hear the water." The day after the funeral, O'Keeffe took control of An American Place.Source: Wikipedia Image:All images © Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Gift of Georgia O'Keeffe
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