Alfred Stieglitz's Photographs of Clouds

In 1922, Alfred Stieglitz made ten photographs of clouds, thus beginning a series of photographs which occupied his attention for the next eight years. The Equivalents, as he came to call them, have been hailed as his most important contribution to photography. His aim was not to distill the essence of clouds but to transform them into an abstract language of form expressive of his feelings. Stieglitz believed that the sources of the Equivalents lay in his student work made in the 1880s. This dissertation proves, however, that his 1920s cloud photographs have little in common with his earliest work and are instead the culmination of his forty-year investigation into the medium of photography. The first chapter analyzes the sources of the cloud photographs in Symbolist art and photography as it was understood by Stieglitz and his associates at the turn of the century. The second chapter notes how the Stieglitz circle artists and critics (including Charles Caffin, Max Weber, Marius de Zayas, and Francis Picabia) merged this Symbolist heritage with their understanding of modern art, and it examines the new critical vocabulary which developed to explain abstract painting. Further, it charts Stieglitz's growing appreciation of abstraction and its influence on his understanding of the nature and function of photography. The third chapter discusses the influence on Stieglitz's cloud photographs of the post-World War I movement of cultural nationalism as espoused by writers and critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, and Sherwood Anderson. It explains how this movement to understand the nature of the American spirit impelled Stieglitz, as well as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe, to believe it was culturally imperative for them to unreservedly express their feelings. The fourth chapter examines how Stieglitz merged this heritage of Symbolism, modern art, and cultural nationalism into his cloud photographs. Further, it analyzes the stylistic and theoretical development of these photographs and Stieglitz's use of sequential and serial imagery. The concluding chapter assesses the importance of the Equivalents and their impact on American art and photography.