From My Window at the Shelton, North 1930

Alfred Stieglitz took this photograph, From My Window at the Shelton, North, with gelatin silver. Here's a man looking out a window at a building under construction, all scaffolding and steel girders, reaching up into the sky. It’s all about structure and form, not just of the building, but of Stieglitz's own vision as an artist. You can imagine him up there in the Shelton Hotel, gazing out, and seeing not just a building, but the bones of modernity itself. Maybe he was thinking about how everything is in progress, always being built and torn down, and how photography captures a moment of that process. It’s like he's saying, "Look, this is what it feels like to be alive right now—this constant state of becoming." Think about other photographers of the era. They were all trying to figure out how to make sense of this new, fast-paced world. Stieglitz, with his moody skies and towering structures, was part of that conversation, showing us the beauty and the grit of the modern age.