Equivalent 1934

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph, Equivalent, and many others, hoping to show how photography could be as expressive as painting. The tones, ranging from velvety blacks to hazy whites, feel so free, and this is not an accident. Stieglitz knew that the so-called real world only tells us so much; we also have our feelings, our inner weather. The wispy clouds here, caught just so, seem to match up with inner states. They are stand-ins, in a way, for a feeling. Look closely and you can see how the shapes move in and out of focus. It’s like how we grasp at ideas, only to have them slip away. The way that art can catch something so fleeting is, in my opinion, its greatest power. Think about other artists who use abstraction to explore psychological states, like Hilma af Klint, and you’ll see how Stieglitz was part of a much bigger conversation.