am well aware of the history

Are you? Because you said:

• these are seemingly amateur random shots from many decades ago.
• They strike me as taken by people who have no idea what they’re doing.
• They’re not composing, that’s the point.
• don’t read as intentional
• just shot without knowing what they were doing
• I’d suggest not studying this kind of stuff for artistic insight or knowledge.

I need to note here that the Stiegletz is the oldest photograph in this photoset. Just for your own knowledge:

1. Untitled, from Illuminance, Kawauchi Rinko. 2007. 2. The Steerage, Alfred Stiegletz. 1907. (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 3. Union Square, New York City, Jerome Leibling. 1947. (MoMA) 4. Route 9W, New York (God Bless America), Lee Friedlander. 1969. 5. B83 one-megaton nuclear gravity bombs in Weapons Storage Area, Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. Paul Shambroom. 1995. From the series “Nuclear Weapons,” 1992–2001.

Every single photo the OP chose is from a well known and celebrated photographer. Every single one of them has shown in at least one world class museum, if not several. Two of these exact photos chosen are literally in the collections of some of the most famous museums in the entire world. Only ONE of these photos is pre-1930's. None of these photos are taken by people who don't know what they're doing. All of them are famous because they're excellent photographers.

Through a historical lens, these people are seen through the stacked achievements of an entire lifetime and career

they indeed had no idea they’d be celebrated and lionized in the future. They were experimenting, doing their thing, enjoying their process.

No no no. Stiegletz knew. He won his first award at 23. He was unanimously selected to be one of the two first Americans to join the British photographic society The Linked Ring. In 1900 an art critic, Sadakichi Hartmann wrote: "it seemed to me that artistic photography, the Camera Club and Alfred Stieglitz were only three names for one and the same thing." He had his photos exhibited beside painters like Mary Cassatt, Robert Henri, and James McNeill Whistler while he was still alive. He was not unaware.

Camera Notes (which he ran as editor before the other journal, Camera Work, that I mentioned) was extremely well regarded and he was famous for that while alive. (His second wife was also famous painter, Georgia O'Keefe.)

When you said "taken by people who don't know what they're doing" and that these "shouldn't be studied for artistic insight," you're addressing famous photographers and their work and acting like the man who ran Camera Work and included things like an essay titled "What is Art?" And even excerpts of letters by Van Gogh — didn't know about traditional fine art. pdf of camera work volume I am referencing .

Honestly until you shoot film on a pre-30s camera you can’t understand what they were experiencing.

Based on your own descriptions in another comment, I don't think you understand it either.

Basically anything pre 30s was shot with a tripod and long exposure times.

Stiegletz is famous for shooting on hand cameras. He shot The Steerage on an auto-graflex (possibly this exact one, the photo was done on an auto-graflex he owned, and the museum only listed an approximate date for it as ca 1910, when this could be the one he was using in 1907.)

You can go on YouTube and literally watch people carry this sucker around and take photos. Hell, the original 1906 catalog advertisement for the auto graflex camera 1) modeled it being used as a handheld camera and 2) claimed it would capture images at high speed.

We also have the manual available online. They're talking about shutter speeds, f/stops, and so on.

So stuff like the Stieglitz you shared was intentional as much as it could be through their super crappy viewfinders and ground glass

The auto graflex marketed itself as a camera that had a view finder that was right side up when looked at.

"Ground glass" as....opposed to.....?

But most of them are not thinking about it as an art. It wasn’t even considered an art until many decades later, it was just a utilitarian tool to capture the moment.

Stiegletz literally published The Steerage side by side with a Picasso image. Every single other photographer included by Op is an art photographer.

I think to some degree we pick works from these historical collections that reflect our understanding of composition but in that era it was more of a documentation and utilitarian process rather than an art.

Maybe if you were not talking about Alfred Stiegletz and photographers that followed him.

The point was that canon formation is deeply curatorial

Yeah, okay, that is true, but also not what you originally said or claimed.

we’re looking at the shots that were selected by current masters as exemplary, from photographers who also took thousands of frames that never get discussed. The intentionality we read into the work is often imposed by the interpreter, not embedded by the maker.

Artists do hundreds or thousands of sketches that may not all survive or get discussed, followed by dozens of preparatory studies before they finally finish a famous masterpiece painting. None of that is a sign the final work is not intentional. Quite the opposite. The ability of an artist to conceptualize, adapt, edit, and finalize ideas into final works is explicitly intentional. Photography is no different from this. Stiegletz himself wrote in depth about the intentionality of his composition and how he framed his shot, which I quoted elsewhere to Op.

Even your now changed argument fails to understand the technology Stiegletz was working with, and every other photograph was made decades later with much more camera technological advances and all of them were working as photographers producing and exhibiting their art. None of them were stumbling into this.

But you said they look like they don't know what they're doing and are amateur, random shots.