Two Towers — New York

Photographed in 1911 from Madison Square, Two Towers — New York frames two newly built skyscrapers — the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower (1909, briefly the tallest building in the world at 213 metres) and the adjacent Madison Square Garden tower by Stanford White — looming above the low-rise downtown grain. The image, issued as a photogravure in Camera Work no. 36 (October 1911), encapsulates early twentieth-century urban modernity: the vertical race that defined New York between the Singer Building (1908) and the Woolworth (1913) compressed into a single tonal exercise. Stieglitz framed the two towers high in the image so the surrounding city becomes the actual subject — a compositional gesture Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott would inherit twenty years later as the syntax of American urban documentary. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (DP257101) holds the print within the Alfred Stieglitz Collection donated by the photographer himself in 1933, the foundational gift of 419 prints that established the museum as a primary repository for his authorised editions, alongside the National Gallery's Key Set of 1,642 prints donated by Georgia O'Keeffe between 1949 and 1980. At Maison Picturale today, the photogravure idiom — warm tone, fine grain, intaglio-deposited ink — transposes most faithfully into a platine-palladium tirage on 640 gsm cotton paper: the noble-metal procédé delivers the long mid-tone scale Stieglitz required for the haze-modulated city air, without the toxic intaglio plates the gravure once demanded. A charbon (carbon transfer) alternative would push the print toward the matte deposit-rich surface of the original, both routes built on Vision Picturale's reformulated non-toxic chemistry.

Reference file : MET Open Access via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)