In the early years of this century, Alfred Stieglitz was celebrated as a writer, a publisher, a photographer, an art dealer, a proselytizer for photography and modern art, and a visionary. Then, after giving much of his formidable energy to his public career, Stieglitz turned again to his own photography, exploring throughout the twenties and thirties his personal world at Lake George in the Adirondacks, where he spent summers at a farmhouse that had been part of his father's estate.

He photographed the place and the things around him - the farm, the landscape, the sky, and details of the intimate life he led with family and friends, especially his young wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. This body of work, both radical and private, constitutes the essence of Stieglitz's achievement as a photographer, and has never before been presented as a coherent whole.

1. Stieglitz has always been famous, but his late work is little known. In this book, a selection of sixty-four of the best of the Lake George photographs is splendidly reproduced: over half of these works have never been published anywhere. They represent prints originally given to public collections by Georgia O'Keeffe, and will be shown in September 1995 in an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which this volume accompanies.