A pioneer photographer, art gallery director, writer, and publisher, Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) organized the Photo-Secession movement in 1902 to advocate photography as fine art. Shortly thereafter, he began Camera Work (1903-17), a periodical devoted to the promotion of the medium as a means of artistic self-expression and an organ for criticism. Upon its founding, Stieglitz enlisted other like-minded photographers into his movement who embraced labor-intensive processes that produced artistic, painting-like effects and emphasized the role of the photographer as craftsman—an aesthetic followed by the photographers known as Pictorialists.

Stieglitz introduced America to the possibility and promise of color photography even before the new autochrome process was available in the United States. After his introduction to the technique while traveling in France (1907), Stieglitz began making autochromes and organized his first color photography exhibition at his gallery in November 1907. His excitement at this new technology indicates his lifelong embrace of (and passion for) emerging ideas and innovations that advanced the photographic medium and offered new opportunities to elevate its role in the fine arts.