The role of information in artist’s lives is quixotic. One of our tacit bonds is decisiveness on the specificity of what we individually pay attention to.
— Anne Truitt, Always Reaching
It’s 1922. Alfred Stieglitz —the first to elevate photography from mere representation to a fine art— took a few pictures of clouds. The resulting series was called Equivalents, which you can see on the Art Institute of Chicago’s site.
Consider for a moment how difficult it was to take pictures of clouds in 1922. Here is an approximate sequence, just to snap one pic:
Set up your large format camera on a sturdy tripod (a 25-40 lb set-up)
Load glass plates or sheet film into film holders in complete darkness
Insert loaded film holder into camera back
Compose your shot by viewing the clouds through the ground glass
Calculate exposure by estimating cloud brightness and light conditions
Remove the dark slide from the film holder
Wait for the desired cloud formation to appear
Make the exposure using the shutter release
Replace the dark slide immediately after exposure
Remove the film holder from the camera
Return to the darkroom in complete darkness
Develop the glass plate by hand with careful chemistry control
Fix and wash the negative
Dry the plate
Make contact prints in the darkroom to create final photographs
In the essay, How I Came to Photograph Clouds, Stieglitz wrote, “I was in the midst of my summer’s photographing, trying to add to my knowledge, to the work I had done. Always evolving —always going more and more deeply into life— into photography.”
He wrote more. About the decline and disintegration around him, the decline of nature. Humans. His own mother. “The world in a great mess”.
And then he wrote in a letter to the painter, Georgia O’Keeffe: "My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world's constant upsetting of man's equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it."
He began to call this series “Songs of the Sky.” On the back of one photo, he scribbled a dedication to Alma Wertheim:
“From one who seems ever learning yet never seems to know anything except that there are Very Perfect Moments, and long, long periods of Pain, a moving towards perhaps, the Perfect Moments.”
Clouds had been photographed before, as far back as 1850, but were almost entirely taken from a technical viewpoint. Stieglitz wrote to Georgia, “I know exactly what I have photographed. I know I have done something that has never been done.”
What had never been done?
He was taking photographs of something real in order to express something invisible. He used physical reality to point to non-physical truths, and in this sense, an inner state made visible, hence: equivalents.
Anne Truitt was once asked: “Tell me about Stieglitz’s Equivalents series, because I felt they had a particular resonance. I’m not convinced many people have truly understood what Stieglitz was doing with those photographs.”
Truitt: “I need to begin with the fact that I’m essentially a Platonist—which sounds pretentious, but I believe that the reality we perceive reflects a deeper, more fundamental reality beyond it. What caught me about those photographs was that I felt Stieglitz was trying to capture what fascinates me in life: those moments when I look at an object and it seems to reveal the underlying structure behind itself.
Also, in purely visual terms, the Equivalents work with subtle variations in tone—not grand structural contrasts, but small shifts in value contained within a deliberately chosen frame extracted from a much larger scene. You take an entire sky and isolate one small rectangle within it… and that approach interested me deeply.”
When Truitt wrote, “the role of information in artists’ lives is quixotic” she meant that to an outside observer, an artist’s obsessions —what they choose to read, watch, think, create— seems either idealistic or impractical, certainly foolish. But these feverish fixations are vital to the artist. Whether tilting swords at windmills or hoisting a 40 lb. camera to photograph a tiny corner of a cloud.