Stieglitz's Equivalents

Stieglitz's Equivalents? Not Really.

   
      About 100 years ago Alfred Stieglitz took his view camera out to his back yard at Lake George in upstate New York and pointed it at some clouds floating overhead. He made some beautiful photographic prints from the resulting negatives. I have seen some of them in the flesh and they are excellent. Steiglitz called them his “equivalents” which, he claimed, were the equivalents of what he was feeling when he made the photos and what you should feel when you look at them. An “equivalent” emotional state. You, the viewer, he demanded, should “relive” what  he lived.

    Stieglitz was, in many ways, a jerk, so I suspect he was having us on.

    But it was in a good cause. Photography was still in its infancy and Stieglitz made it his life's work to convince people that good photography could be fine art and that great photography is great art. In that effort he was largely successful, thank goodness.  

    So successful in fact that serious critics came along and studied the art form. Susan Sonntag, Janet Malcolm, and Roland Barthes are three who come to mind. Barthes penetrated more deeply perhaps with his concepts of the studium and the punctum. (Barthes was French philosopher so he is a challenge to read. He was also an expert in semiotics. Semiotics, we read somewhere recently, is a science that explains to us what we already know in words we can't understand. People who write about photography are sometimes guilty of that too, present company excepted of course.)

    But, back to those clouds. They were, after all, standard issue clouds. Stieglitz made more than 300 photos of clouds over a decade, using the then new panchromatic film. He sometimes exhibited them sideways or upside down. Because most had no frame of reference it didn't matter. Any moderately competent photographer could have done the same and with today's digital cameras one wouldn't even need a tripod. You could go lie down, point the thing at the sky, and get nice photos of nice clouds. You might find it relaxing. Perhaps Stieglitz did too, but he was after bigger game, so I'm betting he wasn't relaxed. Whatever equivalent he was reaching for, it was more than relaxation. He claimed the photos summed up his philosophy of life. He wanted them to evoke the same reactions that music evokes. And, as far as we know, he was the first photographer to seriously photograph clouds and pioneers are never relaxed.

        Barthes can help us with this. His “studium” is simply curiosity. We look at a photograph with curiosity first. Then something in the photo grabs our attention. Barthes calls that the “punctum” and that is what turns a snapshot into an artistic photo. It's the primary point of interest. And here is where Stieglitz's equivalents get into trouble. For many viewers there simply are no punctums in his clouds. Sometimes a cloud is just a cloud. That does not mean Stieglitz's clouds are not art; they are, just not substitutes for your own experience of looking at them. There is a limit to how much a photograph can do and supplanting you as a viewer is beyond that limit.

    It may be that, out of his sense of mission, he exaggerated. Perhaps it was merely his ego; no one who ever moved the world did so from modesty.

    Far better then, for you to look at any art work unconcerned with what it may have meant to the artist who created it. What does it mean to you? If it pleases you, it pleases you. It may be that knowing the story behind the photograph or the artist's motivations in making the photograph will deepen and enrich your experience of the photograph but neither you nor the artist need strive for equivalence. You can't relive my experience of being there and I can't relive your experience of looking at the result.  For an artist, the art is personal, a road to one's own expression. For a viewer, the road may diverge.

     Demanding a viewer have the equivalent experience as the artist is erecting a lighthouse on Sandia Peak; interesting perhaps, but useless to protect ships at sea.

---