A Bit of Venice was photographed in the early summer of 1894 and published in New York several times later in the same decade. The striking photograph summarizes the results of Stieglitz’s nine years of study in Europe and represents the moment when the impact of his crusade on behalf of photography as an art form was first being felt in the United States.

The photograph was taken during Stieglitz’s four-month European honeymoon in 1894 and his first trip to Venice since 1887. Shortly after his return to New York, Stieglitz created a photogravure from the negative. Clearly satisfied with the result, he published the image four times between 1897 and 1899 in influential photography magazines and books. In 1897 it appeared in the magazine Camera Notes and in Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Images. In 1898 it appeared in The Photographic Times. The photogravure was also included in an 1899 portfolio published by the Camera Club of New York.

In its careful composition, use of soft focus, and straightforward printing methods, without manipulation or retouching, A Bit of Venice epitomizes the qualities sought in pictorial photography. At the forefront of circa-1890 European photography, pictorial photographers recognized that, while much was to be learned about composition and point of view through the study of contemporary painting, they could achieve effects with their cameras unattainable in any other medium. In his Venetian photographs, Stieglitz presents a point of view not unlike that to be seen in James McNeill Whistler’s much-discussed Venetian etchings (1879-80), but in A Bit of Venice he captures a damp mystery that could be suggested only with a camera.

The influence of European painting always lurks in Stieglitz’s images from the Venice honeymoon trip. Also evident, however, is the impact of New York City, where Stieglitz currently was working. Excited by the modern city growing around him, Stieglitz was also challenged by the absence of strong pictorial traditions and the possibility for photography to assume a significant leadership role in the city’s vision of itself. The most ordinary everyday activities — for example, steaming horses turning a trolley around on a freezing day depicted in The Terminal (1893)–became the basis for memorable images presented from an unsentimental pictorial point of view.

My hand camera negatives are all made with the express purpose of enlargement and it is but rarely that I use more than part of the original shot,Stieglitz wrote in 1897, adding that prints from the direct negative have but little value. His change of attitude over the years is evident in his reuse of the 1894 negative in the early 1930s in a gelatin silver print. Revealing that the 1897 photogravure represented only about a quarter of the original negative, the later more complete image lacks the mysterious quality of the photogravure. (source of this text is http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/Stieglitz_Venice.htm)