Like the calotype and the daguerreotype, the three-person picture appeared in 1839, but unlike them it did not come of age until 1905. Although it was so tiny at its official unveiling that it would have fit comfortably inside the empty and haphazardly-placed frame on a wall in Edward Steichen’s 1898 Self-Portrait, it had already staked a claim to a position on another kind of wall : one in a museum. When this claim was finally redeemed, it was a matted and framed picture of Alfred Stieglitz and his daughter, Kitty, hung at eye level on one of the walls of The Little Galleries, a step away in each direction from a similarly scaled, matted, framed and mounted print. This may not seem very large to those accustomed to Andreas Gursky’s gigantism, but a picture by Steichen can’t be measured the way Gursky wants us to measure his. Although Ocean III is enormous—13’ x 13’—there is no room it, as Peter Galassi observes, for us. Steichen’s Alfred Steiglitz and his Daughter Katherine is only 18” x 16”, yet big enough not only for an author, a sitter and a beholder, but for all of the people.
Photograph by Eileen Neff
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