Unrarified Air:Alfred Stieglitz and the Modernism of Equivalence Kate Stanley (bio) In 1923 Alfred Stieglitz published "How I Came to Photograph Clouds," a short essay in which he writes: I always watched clouds. Studied them. … So I began to work with the clouds—and it was with great excitement … Every time I developed I was so wrought up, always believing I had nearly gotten what I was after—but had failed. A most tantalizing sequence of days and weeks.1 This "tantalizing sequence" of initial experimentation would later yield a formidable legacy, as Stieglitz would spend nearly a decade (1923–31) producing the pivotal series of cloud photographs he would title the Equivalents.2 During this period he printed and exhibited hundreds of cloud images, most taken during the summers he spent with Georgia O'Keeffe at Lake George, in the Adirondacks. When Stieglitz turned his camera to the skies in the early 1920s, the resulting photographs sometimes included a sliver of horizon or the silhouette of a tree, inclusions which hold the vastness of the cloudscape in relative perspective against the scale of the earth. Yet by the late 1920s, most visual references to solid ground disappear from the work, seeming to set the clouds adrift within their frames. Free of mooring, their spatial proportions and positioning indeterminate, the cloud images become disoriented from any authoritative vantage: their shapes and textures may imply certain atmospheric vectors or conditions, but no single beholder's grounded point of view definitively calibrates them (fig. 1). [End Page 185] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1925, gelatin silver print, 11.8 x 9.2 cm, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1928, 29.128.4. Image courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. While critics frequently convey the disorientation that the Equivalents provoke in viewers, interpretations of this vertiginous experience tend to divide into two critical camps—one reflecting a formalist investment in modernism, the other reflecting a philosophical investment in transcendental idealism. When Stieglitz's clouds are considered in modernist terms they are most often seen to indicate "radical absence," as sheer and arbitrary signs that potently signify a missing referent.3 Per Rosalind Krauss's influential reading, Stieglitz exemplifies Stanley Cavell's early definition of the modernist artist, a figure tasked above all with revealing the criteria upon which his aesthetic medium fundamentally depends. Krauss argues that Stieglitz reveals the "essence" of modern photography in the technique of the cut or crop, which punches the cloud images out of "the continuous fabric of the sky" ("Stieglitz/Equivalents," 134). Within this interpretive framework, the logic of equivalence suggested by the work's title polemically equates clouds with a monumental vacancy: the "absence … of the world and its objects, supplanted by the presence of the sign" (140). In other words, Stieglitz's project is seen [End Page 186] to disclose an exemplary modernist aim by transforming the "natural signs" of clouds into the "unnatural signs, into the cultural language" of modernism itself (135). In Krauss's account, clouds operate for Stieglitz as a kind of non-subject that allows him to give the unique mediating properties of photography his undivided attention—the evanescence of his content pointing up the coalescence of his form.4 Here Stieglitz's search for illuminating equivalences uncovers the fundamental modernist problem of correspondences—that unbridgeable chasm of difference between representation and referent, between clouds in a photograph and clouds in the sky. With this correlation irrevocably ruptured, the photographer's search for equivalence can only finally depict the fact of disconnection, absence, and self-referentiality. Yet while for Krauss Stieglitz may represent a modernist semiotics of absence and abstraction, his clouds have just as frequently been framed as signs of divine presence made visible, or what Stieglitz himself once described as "God in some form or other."5 Beginning with Waldo Frank in 1919, a long line of commentators have asserted Stieglitz's place in an American tradition of transcendental idealism that traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Frank describes this idealist project as a "transcending leap away from all that was mortal-human."6 Those who follow in Emerson's stead, Frank observes...
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