Dualities - Dorothy Norman 1932

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph, Dualities - Dorothy Norman, and we can see the tone and the grain as part of his artistic intention. The texture is amazing, because the contrast between the black and white shapes reveals Dorothy's features, but almost obscures her at the same time. There's a slippage between clarity and obscurity, like a charcoal drawing that's been smudged and reworked a million times. If you look closely at the eyes, you can see the reflection, which really activates the surface, and pulls you in. I love how Stieglitz uses darks and lights in his image making. They really let you look at how something feels, rather than how it looks. The detail makes it into something raw and full of feeling. Like Picasso, Stieglitz was interested in capturing different perspectives in the same plane. This makes me think about the work of Gerhard Richter, who also played with focus and blur to create these kinds of effects, using abstraction to hint at an underlying emotional reality.