Flatiron Building, New York 1903

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph of the Flatiron Building in New York. It's all soft focus and atmospheric, like he's painting with light instead of pigment. There's something about the way the snow blurs the edges of the building, making it feel less like a solid structure and more like a ghostly apparition. The whole image is muted, like a memory fading at the edges. It reminds me of some of the early modernist paintings of the time, where form and space are dissolving into abstraction. The texture of the print itself seems rough, with the tones pulling away from each other in places, so the subtleties are really apparent. Look at the way the bare branches of the tree in the foreground echo the sharp angles of the building; it's as if nature and industry are in conversation, a sort of dance of forms. This interest in photography as a way of capturing a particular mood reminds me of the work of Edward Steichen. Both artists were exploring the poetics of the everyday, finding beauty in the fleeting moments of urban life. Is it a landscape, or a portrait? Like a lot of good art, it's probably both!