Tree Set 5 c. 1924

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph, Tree Set 5, with a camera, and look how dark it is! Imagine Stieglitz out there, pointing his lens up, up, up at those bare branches against the heavy sky. You can almost feel the chill, right? The way the branches reach out, all spindly and a little bit broken, it’s like they’re trying to grab something from the air. There’s this drama, this intensity, in how he framed the tree against that looming sky. I wonder if he was thinking about loss, about winter, about the stark beauty of things stripped bare. Stieglitz was part of a whole movement of photographers pushing to have photography recognized as fine art, and his work shares this intense feeling. He inspired people to really *look* at the world in a new way.