Provenance

Georgia O'Keeffe; gift to NGA, 1949.

Associated Names

Bibliography

2002

Inscriptions

by Georgia O'Keeffe, on mount, lower left verso, in graphite: 123 B

Wikidata ID

Q64034678

Scholarly Remarks and Key Set Data

In this wintry scene of a dock in lower Manhattan, Alfred Stieglitz positioned his camera so that a ship appears to skewer a gas streetlight and nearly reach the buildings across the road. The streetlight divides the view down South Street. At left, men in hats and overcoats stream past sign-flecked storefronts; they are balanced, at right, by a line of moored ships stretching into the distance. Looking closer reveals a flurry of activity, including a street cleaner with a pipe dangling from his mouth and, behind him, horse-drawn carts carrying goods to and from the docked ships. A largely empty street occupies the bottom half of the photograph, lending space to an otherwise crowded composition and drawing attention to mesmerizing reflections in the puddles of melting snow.

Stieglitz frequently juxtaposed old and new in his photographs of New York. Coenties Slip was the last survivor of more than a dozen man-made inlets (known as slips) created along the lower East River before the mid-19th century. Its days, and those of the clipper ships that docked there, were numbered. The new pictured here is the recently opened Brooklyn Bridge (1883), a marvel of modern engineering that can be glimpsed in the distance.

This photograph is part of the Alfred Stieglitz Key Set, the largest, most complete, and most important collection of photographs by Stieglitz in existence. Georgia O’Keeffe gave the Key Set of 1,642 photographs to the National Gallery of Art in 1949 and 1980.