Alfred Stieglitz

In 1922 Alfred Stieglitz—the influential photographer who played a seminal role in defining and promoting modern art in the early twentieth century—began to document the sky at his family estate on Lake George in New York. He eventually produced more than two hundred images, including Songs of the Sky B3, for the series, which came to be called Equivalent. The small size of these prints, made with a handheld Graflex camera, contrasts with their expansive subject. Light, the very substance of photography, is foregrounded here, expressing the tension between the transitory and the eternal that underlies photographic practice.

This series was a departure for Stieglitz, who spent much of his career advocating for “straight photography” through the numerous institutions he developed. These included the magazine Camera Work and a succession of important galleries in which he championed the work of fellow photographers such as Edward Steichen and Paul Strand along with the paintings of European and American modernists—including his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, whose painterly abstractions of nature may have influenced the Equivalent series.

In this early print from the series, wisps of woolen white-and-gray clouds frame a slice of piercing light against a darkened sky. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the soft, curving shapes of the dissipating clouds, which, disconnected from everyday experience, are meant to suggest an “equivalence” between one’s thoughts and nature. “Several people feel I have photographed God,” Stieglitz wrote to the poet Hart Crane in 1923. By connecting his inner life to the natural world, Stieglitz imbues a cross-section of the sky with spiritual depth through a rhythm of abstracted forms.