Soap Bubbles

Children, Contests, Documentary, Games, Genre: Children

Dimensions

Image Dimensions: 8.8 x 14.4 cm | 8.0 x 13.7 cm
Support Dimensions: 23.5 x 17.4 cm | manilla leaf with deckled edge on lower margin

Associated Blog Posts:

Sharp as Needles & Woolly as Mary's Lamb

Soap Bubbles won an award of honorable mention and $20.00 for Stieglitz in the Kodak contest in Class C Open category for Enlargements.

Mounted using Kodak dry mounting tissue on the volume manilla leaf, the photograph is printed on Velvet Velox photographic paper.

Soap Bubbles  reproduced as the frontis halftone illustration for the August 16, 1907 issue of London’s Photographic News with the following editorial comment: 

To many, if not all of our readers, the work of Alfred Stieglitz is quite familiar; yet there are many things in “Soap Bubbles.” a picture to which a £10 prize in the recent Kodak £400 competition was awarded (see page 145), worthy of comment. In the first place the part played by the sunlight is an important point, and no mean point either, for were it not for the crisp lights on the little models the picture would lose much of its “live” effect. The impression that pictures against the sun (or ” with the sun in your lens,” as many prefer to call it) are impossible is a prevalent fallacy among a certain class of amateurs, therefore it is particularly helpful to find a picture such as “Soap Bubbles,” for the fallacy is proven. If the reader will close one eye, and then look at this picture, quite a stereoscopic effect will be obtained, the figures will stand away from the background. It is a typical specimen of the author’s work! Alfred Stieglitz stands at the summit of the American Photo-Secession movement—he has a powerful hold over the photographic world in that country—and whenever he exhibits at any of our exhibitions, his work is noticeable by its strength of treatment.  (1.)

The girl bending over to fill her pipe with the soap-water mixture may be the daughter of Alfred Stieglitz, Katherine “Kitty” Stieglitz, who would have been about six or seven years old when the photograph was made sometime in 1905.

silvering to print recto margins

1. Some Notes on This Week’s Illustrations: p. 158