One thing is certain about New York City—it is always changing. We know this on an instinctual level, but the art of the times is what reveals the city’s shapeshifting energy. As a versatile medium, photography both documents what a camera views while simultaneously revealing more than what is seen at any given moment.

Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to present Fragmentary Glimpses: Alfred Stieglitz and David Vestal in New York, on view starting February 5. This intimate exhibition invites viewers to look at New York through the lens of two photographers who were infatuated with the city’s ever-evolving landscape: Alfred Stieglitz and David Vestal.

In the early 1900s, Alfred Stieglitz hosted modern art exhibitions at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession—named after the Pictorialist group he helped found in 1902—and promoted photography as a legitimate art form through the pages of Camera Work. From 1903 to 1917, this quarterly journal showcased new work by leading artists alongside art criticism and philosophical essays. While the journal primarily featured the work of others, the October 1911 issue focused on Stieglitz’s own photographic vision and is considered one of the journal’s most important issues.

Fragmentary Glimpses presents the entire collection of images that Stieglitz published for Camera Work, No. 36 — “snapshots” (as critics called them) of New York at one of its many turning points. Steamboats and locomotives transport people faster and further than ever before, while airships and newly built skyscrapers usher in an era of reaching new heights. Such iconic works as The Steerage (1907), The Terminal (1892), and Spring Showers (1900) demonstrate how Stieglitz’s modernist framing and ability to render the city’s changing atmosphere—both natural and man-made—helped initiate a new direction for photography at the turn of the twentieth century. A main figure in and proponent of Pictorialism, Stieglitz mastered the photogravure technique, a photomechanical process that allowed for atmospheric and painterly effects while being mass produced.

Decades later, David Vestal photographed the city and its people living in modernity’s shadowy aftereffects. Arriving to New York in the late 1940s after studying painting at The Art Institute of Chicago, Vestal took up photography and joined the renowned Photo League of socialist practitioners. Distinctly more steeped in aesthetic concerns than political ones, his sensitive compositions and attention to light still skillfully capture the unsettling social realities that lingered like smog in most postwar American cities.

The title for this duo show comes from an essay featured in Stieglitz’s October 1911 issue of Camera Work. Referring to New York as “a vision that rises out of the sea,” the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn writes how the city “glimmers for a while in the sun…[then] vanishes, but for fragmentary glimpses….” Both Stieglitz and Vestal knew intimately how their cameras could both capture the city’s insatiable hunger for progress while depicting its illuminous and hazy luster.

Fragmentary Glimpses
Alfred Stieglitz and David Vestal in New York

Robert Mann Gallery
508 West 26th Street
Suite 9F
New York, NY 10001
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