Also titled Icy Night, Central Park, Fifth Avenue, (1910 Buffalo Exhibition) the location of Icy Night is revealed. Dating to 1898, Stieglitz used a Goerz lens and a three-minute exposure to capture the city lights of Fifth Avenue looming behind menacing trees on either side of a snowy park walkway. This composition naturally forms a framework leading the viewer farther inside, at the very edge of Central Park. One not only feels cold looking at the resulting picture, but the starkness and ultimate silence it evokes amps it up to icy cold.

Writing in December, 1909 in The Photographic Times, approximately ten years after Icy Night was first published, author and critic Sadakichi Hartmann waxed eloquent about the possibilities of night photography for his article Recent Conquests in Night Photography, accompanied by a reproduction of Icy Night:

New York is at all times picturesque, but never is it more so than when the daylight has faded and the street lamps are lit. Then it becomes another city entirely. Out of the darkness, like some magical effulgence, merges a dazzling shower of light, a myriad of beaming sparks. Buildings and objects that were of no pictorial consequence in the daylight may assume quite the first place in our favor, and ugly things, not to be dodged anyhow by day, most kindly retire out of sight, or else are turned into things of beauty. Of course, sometimes the opposite state of things prevails, and a subject picked out in the day as being particularly attractive may in the evening show all sorts of awkward lines, etc., the existence of which was quite unsuspected before.

Everywhere loom large bulky forms shrouded in mystery, suggestive, conducive to poetical imagining. Emerging from the gloom are weird shapes like outstretched limbs against a confused glare of light, and beyond an impenetrable depth of shadows. Optical sensations, discordant effects which we are not accustomed to in art, but which succeed in stirring the very depth of our nature.

This branch of photography until quite recently seems to have somewhat been neglected. I mean nocturnal photographs, depicting streets and other public places at night and which convey to the mind a true impression of night as we see it under its various conditions, and not to the daylight pictures “faked” to represent nocturnal impressions. (p. 444)

Icy Night was taken less than three years after the Goerz company founded a branch in New York in 1895. It would be interesting to know how long the artist had owned the lens before making the exposure. In America, the Goerz concern would eventually become known as the C. P. Goerz American Optical Company by 1905. (operating independently in the USA until 1972)

Founder Carl Paul Goerz (1854-1923) was a German entrepreneur who founded the Optical Institute CP Goerz  in 1886, the largest Berlin manufacturer of precision optics at the time.

By 1890, the company introduced its first lens, the same year Goerz secured exclusive production of the instant shutter invented by Ottomar Anschütz . The Goerz-Anschütz-Moment-Camera , which with a shutter speed of 1/1000 of a second enabled the photography of moving objects for the first time, was a commercial success. The Goerz Double Anastigmat , a lens developed by Emil von Höegh , who had been hired to replace the late Moser in 1892 , was similarly successful. –Wikipedia (2024) continues