Equivalents

The majority of them show only the sky without any horizon, buildings or other objects in the frame, but a small number do include hills or trees.

The multiple series Stieglitz called Equivalents combined two very important aspects of his photography: the technical and the aesthetic.

Until the 1920s most photographic emulsions were orthochromatic, which meant they were primarily sensitive to light on the blue end of the spectrum.

In 1922 Stieglitz read a commentary about his photography by Waldo Frank that suggested the strength of his imagery was in the power of the individuals he photographed.

[3] Stieglitz was outraged, believing Frank had at best ignored his many photographs of buildings and street scenes, and at worst had accused him of being a simple recorder of what appeared in front of him.

"[4] Coincidentally at this same time a new panchromatic photographic emulsion was developed that allowed the full range of colors to be captured.

He told his wife Georgia O'Keeffe "I wanted a series that when seen by Ernest Bloch (the great composer) he would exclaim: Music!

And he would point to violins and flutes, and oboes, and brass…"[5] He first exhibited this series in 1923 in his one-man show at the Anderson Galleries in New York, and reported that when Bloch saw them there he had exactly the reaction Stieglitz had wanted.

"[9] The Equivalents are sometimes recognized as the first intentionally abstract photographs, although this claim may be difficult to uphold given Alvin Langdon Coburn's Vortographs that were created almost a decade earlier.

Art critic Hilton Kramer said that Equivalents "undoubtedly owe something to the American modernist painting (Dove's and O'Keeffe's especially) that Stieglitz felt particularly close to at the time.

Stieglitz was not concerned with a particular orientation for many of these prints, and he was known to exhibit them sideways or upside down from how he originally mounted them.

"[11] She further says: New York Times art critic Andy Grundberg said The Equivalents "remain photography's most radical demonstration of faith in the existence of a reality behind and beyond that offered by the world of appearances.

In general, his sets should be seen as "totally artificial constructions which mirror, not the passage of real time, but the change and flux of Stieglitz’s subjective state.