From My Window at An American Place, North 1931

Alfred Stieglitz pointed his camera out of the window at An American Place in New York to make this gelatin silver print. The tones range from a velvety black to a bright, almost paper-like white. I wonder what it was like to be Stieglitz, looking out at the city from his gallery. He crops the image in such a way that includes both signs of urban progress–skyscrapers reaching for the sky–and decay, the dark foreground of broken brick. He’s playing with foreground and background, a common trick that painters use all the time. I like to imagine Stieglitz framed in his window, like a painter with a canvas, arranging the elements of the composition with his eye. Artists are always in conversation with each other, working across media and through time, translating and transforming their ideas. Painting, like photography, is a form of embodied expression that embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations.