Equivalent 1925

Alfred Stieglitz shot this photograph, which he called Equivalent, at an unknown date, but it seems to me he was chasing something. I want to say it was his own state of mind. There’s a lot of dark, atmospheric, wispy, almost viscous looking clouds that fill the image and seem to churn around a small, bright orb of light. It’s an image of tonal gradations and dark values, but there’s this sense of luminosity. Stieglitz was part of a Photo-Secession movement. They wanted to prove photography was just as capable of being 'art' as painting, and so they used soft focus and printing techniques to make photographs resemble paintings. I wonder what it was like for Stieglitz? There he was pointing his camera at the sky trying to capture something intangible. So much art comes from that impulse—to reach for something just beyond our grasp. And that striving, that reaching, is what connects one artist to another across time.