Camera Work: Making a Medium

April 25, 2018 to June 24, 2018

Arcadia Exhibitions is proud to present “Camera Work: Making a Medium”. Sixty years after the invention of photography, the first issue of Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly was published in 1903. American photographer Alfred Stieglitz edited the journal and published forty-eight issues over the next fourteen years, each containing work by the period’s preeminent art photographers and critics.

Through its meticulous design, high-quality prints, and cultured essays, Camera Work galvanized an international photography movement known as the Photo-Secession. It also helped to revolutionize prevailing perceptions of photography as a purely documentary medium by demonstrating that it could be used to create fine art.

“Camera Work: Making a Medium” examines how Stieglitz made the case for photography as an artistic medium by illuminating the design of the journal and the evolution of the photographic processes and styles it showcased. The installation, which includes four issues of Camera Work and eighteen prints from its pages, marks the public unveiling of items donated to Arcadia University by Marilyn Steinbright in 2016. The exhibition was created over the spring semester of 2018 by students in Make an Exhibition, an art history seminar course.