TOOK A 50 MILE DRIVE FOR DINNER WITH SOME NEAR-to-Rist-Camp friends. Dinner was at a husband and wife owner-built home in trendy Bolton Landing on Lake George. A good time was had by all.
Lake George, a summer tourist hot spot, is the place where Alfred Stieglitz and his paramour Georgia O’Keeffe spent summers on Stieglitz’s father’s large estate-staying not in the lakeside villa but rather in a modest farmhouse on the estate. It is where Stieglitz made his famous Equivalents photographs. In case you are not familiar with the photographs, they are photographs of the sky / clouds,
In the making of his Equivalents photographs Stieglitz maintained that these works were a culmination of everything he had learned about photography; he “wanted to put down my philosophy of life—to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter—not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privleges—clouds were there for everyone.”
As photography historian Sarah Greenough wrote:
“The Equivalents are photographs of shapes that have ceded their identity, in which Stieglitz obliterated all references to reality normally found in a photograph”…by doing so ”Stieglitz was destabilizing your [the viewer’s] relationship with nature in order for you to think about nature, not to deny that it’s a photograph of a cloud, but to think more about the >feeling< that the cloud formation evokes.”
Additionally, art critic Andy Grundberg wrote:
“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. They are intended to function evocatively, like music...[E]motion resides solely in form, they assert, not in the specifics of time and place.”
Now, to be truthful, I present this entry not only as a history lesson, re: the medium and its apparatus, but also to reiterate my picture making M.O.—that is, my photographs are meant to suggest something behind and beyond the visual appearance of the quotidian world-not only the surprising visual form that can be extracted from the ordinary but also a hint of my philosophy of life.
That written, have no doubt about it, the making of my photographs is not concept (aka: content) driven. It is driven my my desire to create interesting visual form as manifested in, ya, know, a picture.
However…on the other hand, some might consider form as a rather ethereal / intangible apparition rarely perceived or experienced whole cloth in situ. And, iMo, it is only on the surface of the photographic print that form becomes something “real”. But, even then, for many the perception of it is most often a rather elusive idea, aka: concept.
So, inasmuch as the point of my photographs is not about the their literal referents but, rather about something behind and beyond that offered by quotidian world appearances, I especially like and appreciate this exchange by Stieglitz and a viewer of one of his Equivalents photographs…
Viewer: Is this a photograph of water? Stieglitz: What difference does it make of what it is a photograph? Viewer: But is it a photograph of water? Stieglitz: I tell you it does not matter. Viewer: Well, then, is it a picture of the sky? Stieglitz: It happens to be a photograph of the sky. But I cannot understand why that is of any importance.
