Skyscapes (Mendoza, Argentina)

Sky Portraits, #19, Mendoza, Argentina, 2022

“I know exactly what I have photographed. I know I have done something that has never been done… I also know that there is more of the really abstract in some ‘representation’ than in most of the dead representations of the so-called abstract so fashionable now.”

—Alfred Stieglitz, 1864-1946

“Music, music, why that is music!”

—Ernest Bloch, 1880-1959, composer, upon seeing the first series of Stieglitz’s Equivalents, “Clouds in Ten Movements“.

Stieglitz’s “Equivalents”

Once he had the more advanced film emulsions capable of it, from 1925 to 1934, Alfred pointed his big camera at the sky and began making images of just sky and clouds (though, on occasion, an earth-bound item like a tree or a hill might make it into the frame). 

Why? Why did he do this when most everyone else at the time was so concerned with refining ever more “realistic” depictions of people, places, and things?

Well, someone (one Waldo Frank, apparently) pissed him off with what Alfred thought was a very superficial critique of his work… that it was the subject of the photograph that inbued it with its intrinsic value and not so much anything brought to the picture by the photographer.

So, essentially, Al wanted to prove that there was way more of the actual abstract in any of his apparently “realistic” images than might initially appear to the viewer. “Abstract”, then, in the sense of how the photographer has infused the image with his/her personal creativity and power of interpretation.

An Excellent Summary (But Not Mine):

One of the reasons that the strongest of these photographs appear so abstract is that they are void of any reference points. Stieglitz was not concerned with a particular orientation for many of these prints, and he was known to exhibit them sideways or upside down from how he originally mounted them. Photography historian Sarah Greenough points out that by doing so Stieglitz “was destabilizing your [the viewer’s] relationship with nature in order to have you think less about nature, not to deny that it’s a photograph of a cloud, but to think more about the feeling that the cloud formation evokes.” She further says:

“The Equivalents are photographs of shapes that have ceded their identity, in which Stieglitz obliterated all references to reality normally found in a photograph. There is no internal evidence to locate these works either in time or place. They could have been taken anywhere—nothing indicates whether they were made in Lake George, New York City, Venice, or the Alps—and, except for the modern look of the gelatin silver prints, they could have been made at any time since the invention of photography. And because there is no horizon line in these photographs, it is not even clear which way is ‘up’ and which way ‘down.’ Our confusion in determining a ‘top’ and a ‘bottom’ to these photographs, and our inability to locate them in either time or place, forces us to read what we know are photographs of clouds as photographs of abstracted forms.”

New York Times art critic Andy Grundberg said The Equivalents “remain photography’s most radical demonstration of faith in the existence of a reality behind and beyond that offered by the world of appearances. They are intended to function evocatively, like music, and they express a desire to leave behind the physical world, a desire symbolized by the virtual absence of horizon and scale clues within the frame. Emotion resides solely in form, they assert, not in the specifics of time and place.”

From: Wikipedia, Equivalents, May 7, 2022

A Revealing Conversation

This conversation, supposedly real, gives you an idea of how sternly Stieglitz defended his position:

Man (looking at a Stieglitz Equivalent): Is this a photograph of water?
Stieglitz: What difference does it make of what it is a photograph?
Man: But is it a photograph of water?
Stieglitz: I tell you it does not matter.
Man: Well, then, is it a picture of the sky?
Stieglitz: It happens to be a picture of the sky. But I cannot understand why that is of any importance.

My Clouds

I don’t pretend to copy Al’s Equivalents with these skyscapes, but I do find inspiration in his work and his thoughts about the abstract… abstracts that might provoke certain moods or feelings, or even music.

For me, each of these images freezes a very special moment in time, typically at dawn or very early in the morning, when most of the local folks have yet to awaken from their slumber. These are sky moments that will never ever be repeated in exactly the same way, unique and lonely visuals, photographs of just one, tiny, fraction of a second in a multi-billion year steady stream of infinite possibilities of shape, form, and light.

All images were made between January and March of 2022 with the iPhone XS, all from the same Earthly vantage point in the southern hemisphere, and all with my camera pointed in roughly the same cardinal direction (NE). I have combined a few of them in this photo collage which measures 36 inches by 32 inches at 300ppi.