ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation / Thesis: “LIVING ON PAPER ...

those of famous people he admired. He had autographs, for instance, of Goethe’s patron
Duke Karl August, and the German sculptor Johann Schadow. 24
As biographer
Katherine Hoffman notes, “From a very early age Stieglitz seemed to have a need to be
connected to others – those close to him and those to whom he wished to be culturally or
psychologically connected.” 25
Drawings and other intimately scaled graphic objects
seemed to appeal to Stieglitz, as to many connoisseurs, through their evocation of
emotional closeness.
Stieglitz Becomes a Photographer
Another desire that extended throughout Stieglitz’s life was to find his own areas
of interest and to exert control over them. The boy, for instance, rigorously trained
himself to master such skills as playing billiards and long distance running. 26
Engineering did not prove to be a field that Stieglitz could master. While the young man
enjoyed his student pastimes of reading fiction, attending operas, and playing billiards, he
found no delight in attending lectures on science. 27
Stieglitz recalled his bafflement in
classes taught by the famous German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz.
When the student approached the professor and expressed his difficulty in grasping the
material, he was dismayed to hear the master respond, “I am making this course as simple
as I can. I am discussing the ABC of physics.” 28
Feeling at sea in the subject his father had set him to study, young Stieglitz found
his own interest outside of the classroom in the form of a basic camera and darkroom
equipment he had chanced to see in a shop window. After buying the equipment and a
booklet on how to use it, Stieglitz excitedly took to photography and dark room work.
He soon enrolled in a class with the professor of photochemistry Dr. Hermann Wilhelm
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