From My Window at An American Place, North 1931

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph, From My Window at An American Place, North, using gelatin silver print. It's a pretty classic shot of the New York skyline, but it's got this raw, unfinished construction site right up front. I can imagine Stieglitz, gazing through his window, seeing the city as a site of constant becoming, of growth and decay. There’s something about the way he frames the shot, the contrast between the solid, established buildings and the skeletal structure, that feels super deliberate. It's as though he's trying to say something about progress, about how we're always building on top of what came before. The cables hanging down look like a painter's plumb line: a vertical axis mundi, or world axis, which ties a building under construction to the ground and cosmos. Stieglitz wasn't just snapping pictures, he was trying to find a visual language for the modern world. His photography definitely echoes the kind of stuff painters like John Marin were doing at the time. Artists are always responding to each other, you know, bouncing ideas back and forth across time.