Equivalent 1925

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph, "Equivalent," and well, it's hard to put a date on it, isn't it? It’s a photograph of clouds, but it’s more than that. It's like Stieglitz was trying to capture something fleeting, something beyond just the visual appearance of the sky. Imagine him out there, maybe feeling a bit like a painter staring at a blank canvas. He’s got his camera, aiming it up, trying to find the right angle, the perfect light. Those clouds, they're not just clouds, they're stand-ins for feelings, for ideas. Think about how the light plays across them, the way they shift and morph. Each cloud is a brushstroke. I see a dialogue with painters like Turner, who were also obsessed with capturing the sublime in nature. It’s a conversation across mediums, across time, about how we try to pin down the unpinnable. The image doesn't tell you what to think. And that openness, that ambiguity, that’s where its power lies.