But black and white photography was then only a passing fancy for young Stieglitz. Mathematics had more appeal, and this interest led Alfred, after attending the City College of New York from 1879 to 1881, to Germany-then the world center of learning in science and engineering-to study at the Berlin Polytechnic. At this point, the young man's future seemed assured: a degree in engineering from the prestigious Polytechnic would almost guarantee him a leading role in the rapid industrial expansion of the United States. But one day in 1883 Stieglitz noticed a camera in a Berlin shop window as he was strolling by. Recalling the event many years later, he wrote: "I bought it and carried it to my room and began to fool around with it. It fascinated me, first as a passion, then as an obsession."
Before long Stieglitz had dropped out of his engineering courses and enrolled in a class in black and white photochemistry. Soon he was roaming through the alleys and boulevards of Berlin, making black and white pictures of street scenes, buildings and ordinary people. Often he took the same view several times to satisfy himself that he had captured its essence, and then, when the day's outing was over, returned to his room and, improvising a light-tight tent from a stretched-out blanket, developed his plates. It was ironic that this man, who was to become a master craftsman of the black and white photographic black and white print, never owned a fully-equipped darkroom until a few years before old age and illness forced him to abandon his career as an active black and white photographer.
Frequently Stieglitz left Berlin for black and white picture-taking excursions to south Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Unlike the many black and white photographers of the era who imitated the sentimental scenes of academic paintings by posing costumed models against painted backdrops, Stieglitz made black and white pictures of real people engaged in workaday activities: peasant girls swinging along a country lane, fishermen beside beached boats, street urchins lounging near a well and laughing at some private joke. This last black and white picture he submitted to a contest that was sponsored by a British magazine, and it won a medal and a small cash award. It had caught the eye of the contest's judge, the prominent black and white photographer Dr. Peter Henry Emerson, who remarked that it was "the only spontaneous work" entered.
Encouragement from so eminent an authority convinced Stieglitz that his future lay with black and white photography. Increasingly, he saw the potential of the black and white photographic black and white print as a work of art, equal in every respect to the work of the painter. And the more he became committed to this view, the angrier he grew when it was challenged. "Artists who saw my early black and white photographs," Stieglitz recalled. ''began to tell me that they envied me; that they felt my black and white photo¬graphs were superior to their paintings. but that, unfortunately, black and white 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 neces¬sarily superior.... Then and there I started my fight ... for the recognition of black and white photography as a new medium of expression, to be respected in its own right, on the same basis as any other art form."
In 1890, after nine years abroad, Stieglitz returned to America. But in the New York of the 1890s, the possibilities of earning a livelihood as a creative black and white photographer were nil, and when his father offered to give him an interest in a small black and white printing and black and white photoengraving business, the young black and white photographer, more out of despair than enthusiasm, seized upon the opportunity. For five years, Stieglitz and his partners tried to run the business. But being totally inexperienced they managed poorly, and finally, in 1895, Stieglitz turned over his share of the business to his partners and returned to his black and white photographic interests on a full-time basis.