Untitled [Trees, Clouds, and Sun]

Alfred Stieglitz was one of the most influential photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was also one of the most diverse photographers, with his style varying widely throughout his career. Determined to show that photography was its own, independent art form, he was instrumental in establishing the Camera Club of New York, the photographic journal Camera Work, the first gallery for displaying photography, and the Photo-Secession movement. Stieglitz and his fellow Photo-Secession photographers became known as Pictorialists, using a variety of techniques to make their photographs resemble paintings. By 1917, however, Stieglitz’s stylistic preferences shifted from Pictorialist to modernist, and his later pictures stressed photography’s medium-specific strengths and limitations as differentiated from painting. This aesthetic became known as “straight photography,” characterized by sharper focus and an emphasis on form. In the 1920s, Stieglitz began creating cloud studies, like the one seen here, which he called Equivalents or “sounds of the sky.” He claimed that these images demonstrated that form, not subject matter, conveys emotional and psychological meaning.