Photo secession
Photo secession was the first influential group of American photographers that worked to have photography accepted as a fine art, they seceded the European Pictorialist movement. It was led by Alfred Stieglitz, the group also included Edward Steichen, Clarence H. White, Gertrude Käsebier, and Alvin Langdon Coburn. As a group, they formed the camera club of New York in 1902. It was tightly controlled by Alfred Stieglitz and membership was through invitation only. The Secession’s name was taken from the avant-garde secessionist movements in Europe that required to differentiate themselves from what they considered outmoded ways of working and thinking about the arts.
The Photo-Secession was inspired by art movements in Europe, such as the Linked Ring, that had similar goals. Stieglitz was editing a house magazine, Camera Notes, for The New York Camera Club, of which he was vice-president. He was determined that the magazine should crusade for modern Pictorialism. He discovered and reproduced work by unknown young American photographers such as Clarence White, Edward Steichen and Gertrude
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On the spur of the moment he called this show the work of the "Photo-Secessionists" (secession in art means breaking away from accepted ideas). At first Stieglitz was the only secessionist in existence, but he quickly persuaded the other exhibitors to become founder members of the new Photo-Secession group, whose aims were to hold together those Americans devoted to pictorial photography and exhibit the best that has been accomplished by its members. Many of their ideas for advancing photography were similar to The Linked Ring. However, they had a much broader acceptance of style from straight photography to the diffused manipulated gum print processes used at the time by Coburn and