“The camera eye peers at the subject without any kind of romantic haze, an effect that Stieglitz enhanced by using a slightly out-of-focus background to set the character of the human subject in stronger relief. There is an intensity of expression, a directness of eye contact, that makes this one of Stieglitz's best early studies” (William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1983).

Venetian Gamin is a quintessential representation of the movement known as Photo-Secession to which Alfred Stieglitz founded. Photo-Secession emerged from the broader Pictorialist movement, which dominated photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While both movements sought to legitimize photography in the world of fine art, the Photo-Secessionists explored a wider range of subject matter than the classic romantic motifs of Pictorialism. Stieglitz believed the movement was founded "loosely to hold together those Americans devoted to pictorial photography in their endeavor to compel its recognition, not as a handmaiden of art, but as a distinctive medium of individual expression." (Camera Work, no. 6, April 1904.)

Taken in Venice, Italy on Alfred Stieglitz and his first wife, Emmeline “Emmy” Obermeyer’s honeymoon, this image, among with several others from the trip, burnished his reputation as the principal American photographer of the age. A rare carbon print, the present lot is a stunning example of the labor-intensive carbon process that Stieglitz championed.

There is one platinum print of this image at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. In The Key Set, Sarah Greenough locates variant gelatin silver prints in the following Stieglitz collections: The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. No other carbon prints of the image are known to exist.