One of the most influential forces in photography in the US, the Camera Works magazine was published in New York between 1903 and 1907 by Alfred Stieglitz.
The magazine employed mostly the photogravure process to reproduce on high quality paper, original photographs and also reproductions of paintings and drawings (Stieglitz believed that Pablo Picasso, Matisse and Botticelli were legitimate themes for the magazine, for technical and artistic reasons).
Camera Works also featured short articles, both on technical and aesthetic subjects (for a sample, read Ye Fakers) and there were ads on the very last page.
Stieglitz had had previous editorial experience in The American Amateur Photographer and Camera Notes, and he was determined to make Camera Work a magazine according to his vision. Eduard Steichen, the prominent pictorialist photographer, designed the cover and the typography.
Stieglitz meant the magazine to act as the mouthpiece of the Photo-Secession movement, and the magazine was intensely related to the 291 photo gallery (another Stieglitz endavour).
Financially, the magazine was not successfull. The insistence on high quality, a somewhat limited distribution (the magazine went from an initial publishing run of 1000 copies to 500 for the last issues) made the magazine a drain on Stieglitz's pocket.
Camera Work enjoyed an international circulation, and used pictures from foreign photographers as well (Britain, Germany and Austria).
It published work by Eduard Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Clarence H White, Frank Eugene, Heinrich Kühn, Baron Adolf de Meyer, James Craig Annan, Paul Strand, Robert Demachy, Gertrude Käsabier, Alfred Stieglitz himself and many others.
Camera Work was not static; it started as a pictorialist and symbolist magazine, with a strong insistence on stately, structured portraits and landscapes, and it ended, seventeen years later, with an issue completely dedicated to Paul Strand's "brutally direct" modernist pictures: views of New York geometries, crowds in the street, street portraits, urban confusion covered with snow.
The magazine influenced, to some extent, the next generation of photographers: Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter and Imogen Cunningham. Of course, when they came of age, Pictorialism was dead.
The complete illustrations of Camera Work and a selection of the texts have been published by Taschen.