Songs of the Sky or Equivalent 1923 - 1929

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph, Songs of the Sky or Equivalent, with a camera, not a brush, but look at the image - it might as well be paint. Stieglitz has these rolling dark grays, with small crevices of light peeking through. I imagine him outside, maybe in upstate New York, looking up, framing the shot, waiting for the clouds to arrange themselves like actors on a stage. The dark clouds are so heavy with rain, and the gray is dense, like thick oil paint. It’s a totally different medium, but he gets the same kind of atmospheric feeling as a painter like Turner. I’m thinking about how we look at the sky, and how the sky looks back at us, and how artists, like Stieglitz, capture that exchange. This image shows that all artists are in an ongoing conversation, inspiring one another’s creativity across time.