The Hand of Man, 1902

'...I often walked the streets of New York... I loathed the dirty streets, yet I was fascinated. I wanted to photograph everything I saw. Wherever I looked there was a picture that moved me -- the derelicts, the secondhand clothing shops, the rag pickers, the tattered and the torn. All found a warm spot in my heart...I loved the signs, even the slush as well as the snow, the rain and the lights as night fell. Above all there was the burning idea of photography, of pushing its possibilities even further.' -- Alfred Stieglitz, 1890-1895

One of Alfred Stieglitz’s most iconic images, The Hand of Man serves as a link between his early Pictorialist vision and his mature modernist direction. The artist himself regarded it as one of his seminal images; the combined effect of the atmospheric impressions and the power of industry are indelible. Stieglitz reproduced it twice as a small-format gravure in Camera Work, in Number 1 (1903) and then much later in the definitive issue Number 36 (1911), which included only his own images.

Gelatin silver contact prints of this work are very rare, and all but the present lot are in public collections. In Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs, Sarah Greenough locates twelve such prints in public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.