Equivalents by Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz was a prominent figure in the art world in general, but especially important in the odyssey of getting photography recognized as art. It was an arduous and laborious task; painting was influenced by photography from the beginning and cinema was hailed as the new “total art towards which all the others strive" (by Ricciotto Canudo, who coined it as the Seventh Art) and yet photography, that had been invented decades before motion picture, would not be acknowledged. Stieglitz changed things, opening several exclusive galleries for photography and founding Camera Work, an influential magazine. He advocated that the capture of images should focus on the aesthetic component, attention should be paid to shadows, lines and geometric forms.

Stieglitz was born in 1864 and bought his first camera in 1882. By the end of that decade he had gathered an impressive library about photography, reading extensively about the subject, and then he started writing articles about it. His photographs taken during the 19th century show a myriad of facets of life in New York and of rural, depopulated areas or hidden sections of European cities.

In 1922 the photographer started to capture the image of clouds to find out what he had learned and to "show that (the success of) my photographs (was) not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone". Some consider these to be the first intentionally abstract photographs ever. There was no tradition of detaching photography from reality. Their value comes not only from that but also because it was here that the technical and aesthetic mastery of the artist reached its apex. The fact that in general Stieglitz didn't capture mountains, trees, buildings or the horizon line in these works makes them impossible to date or localize. Is the orientation of these abstracted forms even "right"?

The whole series, which added up to hundreds of images until 1934, would eventually be called Equivalents. Stieglitz intended each of them to be homologous of a state of mind. According to the historian and critic Sarah Greenough, the American wanted the viewers to think "more about the feeling that the cloud formation evokes" than about it as Nature. Some of these were also the first photographs to be acquired by a museum in the US for its permanent collection (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Stieglitz accomplished his goal.

Above, the one on the left is undated, the one on the right is from 1929.