Nancy Newhall on Alfred Stieglitz

“Then, one afternoon he turned me [Stieglitz, in 1941] loose, alone, among the several boxes of [his photo-series:] 'Equivalents'. He had learned to trust me.. ..A couple of hours later I came out in tears. I had been through a tremendous experience. It was like the thunderstorm I felt in my head once in Paris.. ..Music has done this to me many times, but though I already deeply loved photographs, nothing like this had happened to me before.. .Stieglitz, amused and compassionate, waited until I could speak..”

“..he persisted in following his instinctive feeling that the photographic image was more beautiful than anything the human hand could do to it. In the middle of his activities [for 'Photo-Secession' and '291 (magazine)' ], he still found time to greet the new [20th] century with the penetrating tenderness that characterizes his work - photographs of a locomotive, an airplane, of the rising changing city, and the Steerage, that strange picture of immigrants returning to Europe, with his prophetic split organization of form.”