Critic's Practice: Paula
Practice describing and evaluating a photograph. This exercise is for your own learning: nothing is submitted and nothing is graded.
Alfred Stieglitz, Paula (Sun Rays), Berlin, 1889. Photograph. Public domain.
Alfred Stieglitz took this photograph in Berlin in 1889. It shows a young woman named Paula sitting at a desk, writing, lit by sunbeams that stream through a window. It is a key example of pictorialism, the movement that tried to raise photography to the status of fine art by borrowing the techniques of painting.
Notice the qualities that make it pictorialist: the soft focus, the dramatic natural light, the careful composition that places the figure off center and uses the diagonal of the sunbeams to draw your eye, and the atmosphere created by dust visible in the light. Stieglitz was in his mid-twenties when he made the image, and it won a prize in a photography competition.
Your exercise
Write an analysis of Paula as a pictorialist photograph, about 250 to 500 words. Describe the photographic elements Stieglitz uses (framing, light, focus, composition) and explain how those elements belong to the pictorialist tradition. Then consider this question: does the photograph avoid sentimentality (the falsifying of feelings by demanding an easy response), or does it fall into it? Support your judgment with specific observations.
Focus on what you can see. Describe the light, the composition, the focus, and the relationship between the figure and the space around her. Then link your description to what this unit says about pictorialism and its strengths and weaknesses. You are practicing both descriptive and evaluative criticism.
No outside research needed. Everything you need is in the photograph and in the vocabulary of this unit: pictorialism, framing, light, focus, and sentimentality.
Your Notes
This is a thinking space — your response is not saved or submitted. Copy your work if you want to keep it.