Equivalent
Alfred Stieglitz American
Not on view
Beginning in 1922, and then from 1923 to 1934, Stieglitz pointed his lens toward the clouds above Lake George, New York. He eventually made more than two hundred photographs in the series he initially called Songs of the Sky and later Equivalents. In these purposely disorienting and nearly abstract images, Stieglitz sought to arouse in the viewer the emotional equivalent of his own state of mind at the time he took the picture and to show that the content of a photograph was different from its subject. The Equivalents trace Stieglitz’s emotional response to nature through periods of ecstasy and darkness, romantic engagement, and confronting mortality.
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