Songs of the Sky A5 1923

Alfred Stieglitz made this photograph, Songs of the Sky A5, by looking up, up, up, at the sky. The different tones create a kind of abstract landscape, like a Rothko painting made of clouds. There’s a real material drama in the way light and shadow play across the surface. The contrast is super strong, which gives the whole image a graphic punch. Look at the way the clouds billow and swirl. Stieglitz captures them with such precision, you can almost feel the wind pushing them across the sky. Think about that dark patch in the lower left of the image: it anchors the composition, drawing your eye back into the frame. Stieglitz was deeply influenced by the Symbolists, particularly their interest in evoking emotional states through natural imagery, and that comes through in this photograph. Like Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he knew, he was interested in distilling the essence of a thing. It’s a process of reduction, a search for the sublime in the everyday.