Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946, USA) wanted to prove that photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture.

He often made platinum prints—a process that creates images with a subtly varied tonal scale—he achieved a desired connection with painting through compositional choices and the use of natural elements like rain, snow, and steam to unify the components of a scene into a visually pleasing pictorial whole.

Stieglitz's series of photographs of clouds, the Equivalents, were made in a similar spirit, being the realization that truth in the modern world is relative and that photographs are as much an expression of the photographer's feelings for the subject as they are a reflection of the subject depicted. The cloud pictures were portraits of the sky that functioned as analogues of Stieglitz's emotional experience at the moment he took them.