In the 1920s art museums in the United States began to collect and display photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and other leading photographers as works of art. Previous scholars have acknowledged this movement's significance in Stieglitz's struggle for the institutional recognition of photography. They have, however, scarcely queried the conditions under which this movement began. This article scrutinises the circumstances under which the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, accepted prints from Stieglitz and other practitioners of the medium. It posits that the Boston Museum's decision to accept these prints was motivated by its protean curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy's interest in pictorialist and photo-secessionist photography's creative and political possibilities as well as in Stieglitz's life and work. Stieglitz's pictures appealed to Coomaraswamy because he recognised in them ways in which the American photographer was referencing strands of classical South Asian aesthetics to develop more inclusive and more symbolic works of American art. One of these filaments was Stieglitz's absorption of a codified language of hand gestures assumed by dancers and deities that Coomaraswamy was concurrently documenting and interpreting in his writings, photographs and films to elevate maligned traditions of South Asian sculpture and performance as Art. In recovering this narrative of Coomraswamy and Stieglitz's overlapping lives and works, this article begins to disentangle histories of collecting, of modernist photography and of the crystallisation of South Asian art history as a scholarly discipline.