Dorothy Norman 1936

Alfred Stieglitz made this gelatin silver print of Dorothy Norman, and it’s as if he’s sculpting with light. He is laying down tone just so, the way a painter might coax a form out of a dark ground. I wonder what it was like for Stieglitz, working in the darkroom, coaxing these tones from the chemistry. The blacks feel so absolute, like peering into a deep well, and then that stark blade of light cutting across the background – it’s pure drama! It reminds me that photography, like painting, is fundamentally about mark-making, about a specific kind of touch. Here, Stieglitz is touching light. You can feel his presence in the choices he made, where to hold back, where to let the light burn through. And that, for me, is what makes it sing – not just as a document, but as an act of expressive transformation. Art is always answering back to other art.