PHOTOGRAPHS
Stieglitz, Alfred
U.S. (1864 - 1946)
Equivalent XX²
1923 or 1929
Gelatin silver print
4 5/8 x 3 9/16 in. (11.8 x 9 cm) image and sheet size;12 x 11 in. (30.5 x 27.9 cm) mount board size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection
FA 96.117

Photographer, publisher and gallery owner, Alfred Stieglitz was one of the most influential figures in fine art photography during the first half of the twentieth-century. He founded the New York Camera Club in 1897 and was one of the founders of the Photo-Secession in 1902. He remained a strong advocate for pictorial photography long after the Romantic, Impressionist and Symbolist painterly models for pictorialist photographs had been replaced by more abstract modes. In the mid-teens, however, Stieglitz began working in a more direct and literally, more focused approach to photography. This new work first dovetailed with his interest in modernist painting in the early 1920s, when he began a series of cloud photographs called Equivalents. To make these pictures, he turned his large view camera skyward to record dramatic interactions of light and weather with no reference to the horizon. The pictures are direct, focused and crisp in appearance, but compositionally quite abstract. Their title suggests they are intended to be the visual “equivalents” of emotional states, prompting feeling in the viewer without direct narrative.

-- Label copy for The Photographic Impulse: Selections from the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, July 12 to November 10, 2002.