From My Window at An American Place, Southwest 1932

Alfred Stieglitz made this gelatin silver print, titled ‘From My Window at An American Place, Southwest,’ and you can see how he’s working with a restrained palette, almost monochromatic, letting subtle tonal shifts do the talking. It's like he's painting with light, building up layers of atmosphere. The texture is incredible; you can almost feel the gritty surfaces of the buildings and the soft, diffuse light filtering through the sky. Look at the building under construction in the center; the scaffolding and cranes become delicate lines against the heavy geometry of the architecture. There’s a real tension between the ephemeral and the monumental here. It reminds me of some of the cityscapes of the Ashcan School painters, like John Sloan, but distilled down to its purest form. Stieglitz, like those painters, finds beauty in the everyday, framing the modern city as a place of constant flux and transformation. You can see an urban scene in a state of construction. It leaves you with the sense that it’s all just about to change.