Equivalent
1926
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
Image/paper/first mount: 11.6 × 9.2 cm (4 5/8 × 3 5/8 in.); Second mount: 34.7 × 27.7 cm (13 11/16 × 10 15/16 in.)
Classification
gelatin silver print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
66625
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
In this photograph, a stratus cloud, caught like a burst of light against a dark surface, animates the image with a sense of excitement, awe, and perhaps even revelation. The pho-tographer, Alfred Stieglitz, began to photograph clouds in 1922, tilting his camera toward the sky to produce dizzying, nearly abstract images of their fleeting configurations. Over the next decade Stieglitz produced some 350 cloud studies, which he called Equivalents. For Stieglitz, the series was both a technical and ...
About the Artist
Alfred Stieglitz · 1864–1946
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was a pioneering American photographer, art dealer, publisher, and advocate for the Modernist movement who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, to German Jewish immigrant parents, Stieglitz spent his formative years studying mechanical engineering in Berlin, where he discovered photography in ...