"Artists who saw my early photographs began to tell me that they envied me; that my photographs were superior to their paintngs, but that unfortunately photography was not an art.... I could not understand why the artists should envy me for my work, yet, in the same breath, decry it because it was machine-made - their...'art' painting because hand-made, being considered necessarily superior....There I started my fight... for the recongition of photography as a new medium of expressions, to be respected in its own right, on the same basis as any other art form." In 1903 Stieglitz launched, edited and published Camera Work - a magazine which became world famous and continued publication for a number of years. Amateur Photographer was most enthusiastic, and on its first edition of 1903 wrote: "For Camera Work as a whole we have no words of praise too high, it stands alone; and of Mr. Alfred Stieglitz American photographers may well be proud. It is difficult to estimate how much he has done for the good of photography, working for years against opposition and without sympathy, and it is to his extraordinary capacity for work, his masterful independence which compels conviction, and his self-sacrificing devotion that we owe the beautiful work before us." In 1907, it was during a trip to Europe that one of his most well-known photographs was taken It is called "The Steerage":
"There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage.... I longed to escape from my surroundings and join them.... A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right.... round shapes of iron machinery... I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that, the feeling I had about life..." Stieglitz did much to promote photography, and to get it talked about. There were two stages in his