New York, from the Shelton, 1935

Stieglitz regarded photography as a process rooted in the physical world. His architectural studies of New York in the 1930s, taken from his gallery An American Place or, as here, his winter home at the Shelton form sequences of the passage of time. Stieglitz would place his camera in almost exactly the same spot and record buildings at different times of the day or year. The resulting photographs quite literally document the growth and construction that transformed the city in the early years of the Depression.