Water Tower and Radio City, New York 1933

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph, Water Tower and Radio City, New York, using gelatin silver. You know, there's something about Stieglitz that feels like an older brother to me – that turn-of-the-century, modernist impulse, the push-pull between representation and abstraction. Here, the textures, the peeling facades, even that water tower perched on top… It’s as if he’s making a painting out of the city, and the city is, in turn, painting itself. Look at the surface of the building, it is all cracking and veiny, like an aged painting, the lines mapping a history. And then there’s the looming presence of Radio City in the distance, the sharp modernism, the ordered grid that feels so different to that organic feel. I think that's the magic of Stieglitz. He understood that making art is about finding the sublime in the everyday, that the artist can find a moment of discovery through looking closely at what's already there.