Posts tagged Stieglitz

View from the window at Le Gras, 1827 – Heliograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

Is it Art? After nearly 200 years of photographic image making, it may seem naive to ask such a question. Now days, with the boundaries of contemporary art spread across an array of media, asking if something is Art seems ridiculous.

However, if we go back a few hundred years the camera was merely a painting device. Within that view we discover something from history that instructs today. In the early days of photography the question was what do we call an image not done by the artist’s hand but by “The Pencil of Nature”? Everyone knew a photographer only had to execute some technical expertise to make a detailed record, better than by a painter’s hand. Making a photograph was simply following the laws of nature and letting that first created element, light, draw the image.

Canyon_de_Chelly, Navajo 1904 Edward Curtis

At the dawn of the twentieth century, when presented with the challenge “Is it Art”, photographers took a few steps back. In deed, they had accomplished the aim of all painting from the late Renascence up to the early nineteenth century. The camera obscura was a tool often used by painters of that time. Then came impressionism and the modernistic movement in painting and pictorialism in photography. Many of Edward Curtis’ photographs can be seen as pictorial images. Pictorials were “evocative and mysterious” images that stressed composition and a soft focus to allow for the play of visual imagination.

Equivalents 1930 by Alfred Stieglitz

When Alfred Stieglitz’s began shooting his cloud series he titled them “Songs of the Sky”. Later, he replaced that title with the one “Equivalents”. Stieglitz explored the possibility for photography to create art that was abstract, rather than “illusionistically descriptive”. He would say about this approach, “There is a reality — so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. That’s what I’m trying to get down in photography… I have a vision of life and I try to find equivalents for it sometimes in the form of photographs”.

It may sound presumptuous but what Stieglitz sought is, in fact, the true quest of any artistic communication or expression. To be an artist you must have a world view and know it, for art stems from that higher dimension or greater reality where meaning is born.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk more about meaning.

Stay tuned -

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