photo #9138661

The American photographer Alfred Stieglitz was the first to explore the potential of photography as an abstract art. And he did so by turning his camera to the sky. From 1923 to 1934, he made around 220 photographs of the clouds, mostly with no land or objects to act as reference points, depicting abstract celestial forms. They might feel natural for a modern-day cloudspotter, but they were revolutionary in the 1920s. Stieglitz eventually gave the ongoing series of photographs a name: Equivalents. He considered them to be equivalent to feelings, to states of mind.  These images were to become hugely influential in the development of photography as an art form. ‘I wanted to photograph clouds,’ he explained in 1923, ‘to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds, to put down my philosophy of life – to show that (the success of) my photographs (was) not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone.’Equivalent (1930), gelatin silver print, by Alfred Stieglitz, depicts Cirrus uncinus clouds and is in the collection of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, US. The Stieglitz quotation is from his article ‘How I came to Photograph Clouds’ in Amateur Photographer and Photography, September 19, 1923.