Almost everyone enjoys looking at clouds. The constantly changing shapes are fascinating. Alfred Stieglitz seems to have been the first photographer to express his fascination with clouds by photographing them, being successful only once panchromatic film was developed to capture the blue portion of the color spectrum. Stieglitz was the husband of the painter, Georgia O’Keeffe, and was tremendously influential in early 20th century photography: advocate of photography as fine art, founder in 1903 of the quarterly journal, Camera Work, and founder in 1908 and proprietor of the New York gallery 291. Stieglitz titled his series of cloud photos “Equivalents”, which has always been a puzzle to me.

Recently, thanks to Wikipedia, I have learned that the meaning is a reference to symphonic music. Stieglitz’s cloud images are considered the first abstract photos, having no identifiable subject, and were the first photos acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Art. The first six images in this project were taken in a single afternoon in Santa Fe, NM. The variety of formations in such a short period of time reinforce the endless possibilities clouds provide to everyone, with or without a camera at hand. In keeping with abstract imagery, some even do not appear upon first viewing to be clouds – what is it? Images of clouds, however, are not necessarily the final objective. I often replace a featureless sky with clouds from another image.