Equivalent, Set C2 No. 5 1929

Alfred Stieglitz made this gelatin silver print called Equivalent, Set C2 No. 5 sometime in the early 20th century. Look at that moody palette of blacks, greys, and whites! It’s really just a photograph of clouds, but Stieglitz made it, and it feels like something more. I can imagine Stieglitz out there in a field, looking up, squinting, and thinking about how to capture the drama of the sky, what to keep in and what to leave out. He must have thought about how each cloud had its own particular shape, its own edges. Did he see them as individuals, or one massive moving thing? How did he feel as he translated them into silvery form? I think he wanted to show us that photographs could be like paintings: full of feeling, even when they're just of something as everyday as a bunch of clouds. You can almost feel the cool air and hear the rumble of thunder in these shapes, right? That's what painters have been trying to do forever, make a world out of marks. And that's what Stieglitz did here.