Songs of the Sky or Equivalent 1923 - 1929

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph, called Songs of the Sky, using a camera and film; a dance between light and chemistry. Look how he coaxes so much from shades of gray! It’s about process, about seeing what the medium can do. The image is all texture, like a charcoal drawing, where the sky becomes a field of pure mark-making. The clouds billow and churn, but it’s the contrast between the almost black regions and the luminous highlights that really grabs you. There’s a patch on the right where the light seems to burst through, it feels like a breakthrough, or like a moment of pure seeing. Stieglitz called these cloud photographs “equivalents,” suggesting they were stand-ins for feelings, like musical notes. His contemporary, Georgia O’Keeffe, was exploring similar territory in her paintings, finding abstraction in nature, and emotion in form. It's like they were both tuning into the same song.