Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, No. V

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph, a cloud study, with a camera and film, no date given. It's part of a series called “Music.” It's interesting to think about the materiality of photography; it's light, chemistry, and paper, not so different from paint, pigment, and canvas. Stieglitz coaxes a range of grays from his materials. Look at the cloud formation in the upper center, how the light seems to be radiating from behind. It's not just a cloud, it's an event. The light is almost tactile, like a soft, glowing form. The beauty of Stieglitz's cloud photographs is their ability to suggest both the concrete and the ephemeral, a bit like Gerhard Richter’s seascapes, they make the transient feel fixed, and the solid, well, not so much. Artworks like this remind us that seeing is a process, a way of composing reality rather than passively receiving it.