Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, Including Americana

21 (of 50) issues, 4to. Comprising numbers: 9-11 (1905), 16 (1906), 17-21 (1907), 22-24 (1908), 25-28 (1909), 30-32 (1910), with a duplicate of issue 30, and the 1912 special issue. Illustrated with photogravures and halftones after photographs by J. Craig Annan, Annie W. Brigman, Baron A. De Meyer, Frank Eugene, George H. Seeley, and others. (Offsetting, light spotting, toning, some plates missing throughout issues.) Original printed wrappers (spines perished on all, sunning to covers of select issues, institutional markings to covers). Provenance: The Library Philadelphia College of Art (institutional bookplates).

Camera Work was founded out of Alfred Stieglitz's desire to see photography viewed as an art form on a par with fine art. In 1902 he resigned his position as editor of the magazine Camera Notes and with the encouragement of his close friend and fellow photographer Joseph Keiley developed the idea of printing his own magazine which would further the potentials of photography as art in the ways he saw fit, "owing allegiance only to the the interests of photography." (Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography) The resulting magazine, Camera Work, included photographs by some of the era's greatest photographers, including Edward Steichen, James Craig Annan, Alice Boughton, Paul B. Haviland, and Paul Strand. The final issue was printed in 1917 and almost exclusively featured Stieglitz's own work. In subsequent years, the magazine's reputation has only grown, with modern critics praising it for accomplishing its primary goal of elevating photography into an art.