Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, No. III 1922

Alfred Stieglitz captured this gelatin silver print, Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, No. III. I wonder what Stieglitz was thinking when he shot these clouds? Did he have the same feeling I have sometimes? You know, when you try to grab a feeling or thought that's ephemeral, like clouds. He wanted to pin something down, to find some kind of equivalence between what was inside him and the outside world, to find his feeling in those nebulous forms. I love how the tones shift, from light to dark, heavy to light. He understood that a photograph could be like a gesture, each gray scale a mark of feeling, a translation of thought. The clouds morph and swirl. They're both solid and not solid. In that tension, there's this incredible, almost spiritual energy. Stieglitz was a key figure in the history of photography, just like the Abstract Expressionist painters that came after, he captured something internal in external forms.