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Date: Fri 01-Oct-1999

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Date: Fri 01-Oct-1999

Publication: Bee

Author: SHANNO

Quick Words:

Stieglitz-Cornell-photographs

Full Text:

A Focus On Stieglitz And His Equivalents

(with cuts)

NEW HAVEN -- A group of lyrical, abstract images by Alfred Stieglitz

(1864-1946), selected from a series of more than 400 cloud photographs he took

between 1922 and 1931, is the foundation of a special exhibition at Yale

University Art Gallery.

"Alfred Stieglitz and The Equivalent: Reinventing the Nature of Photography,"

on view through November 28, includes 12 works by Stieglitz and 32 by other

American photographers, most of whom shared Stieglitz's vision of "pure

photography."

The Stieglitz "Equivalent" photographs are from the collection of the Beinecke

Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the works by the

other photographers have been drawn from the permanent collection of Yale Art

Gallery. Daniel Cornell, the Florence B. Selden Fellow in the department of

prints, drawings and photographs, organized the exhibition.

"The quality of the Stieglitz `Equivalent' photographs alone world form the

basis for a beautiful display," Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II director

at Yale Art Gallery, wrote in the exhibition catalogue, "yet their placement

within a theoretical framework, and in physical juxtaposition with other

images, sheds new light on the history of photography.

"Mr Cornell has worked diligently to provide us all with an opportunity for

considered and imaginative thought."

Alfred Stieglitz began his career by producing photographs in a style known as

pictorialism, seeking to record personal feelings and responses, as well as

reproducing painterly effects through photographic means.

Pictorialists attempted to create "evocative and mysterious" images that

stressed composition and a soft focus to allow for the play of visual

imagination. They shared this aesthetic with the late 19th Century Symbolists,

who, rather than concern themselves with the exterior world's visual

appearance, focused on the interior experience of emotional states and

feelings.

In the 1920s, Stieglitz reinvented the conventions of symbolic meaning by

adapting a visual vocabulary from the artistic experiments of the European

avant-garde. Using a Graflex single lens reflex (SLR) camera, he directed his

gaze upward and created small, carefully crafted images that were dramatically

disorienting visual statements cut out of cloud-filled skies.

By emphasizing the fields of light and dark through these black and white

images, Stieglitz explored the possibilities inherent in photography to create

a modern art that would be abstract rather than "illusionistically

descriptive." At first he called these works "Music" and "Songs of The Sky,"

but soon referred to them as "Equivalents." The "Equivalent" series concerned

itself completely with finding its sources in nature and natural processes.

While the Yale Gallery's curator makes no claim that Stieglitz alone invented

photographic abstraction, Mr Cornell asserts "the notion of abstraction

developed through the equivalents has been a central force in shaping one of

the major innovations of American photographic practice."

"Alfred Stieglitz and The Equivalent: Reinventing the Nature of Photography"

traces the course of the Equivalent in the history of ideas that have

contributed to the definition of photography in 20th Century America.

The Equivalent presents an aesthetic approach that brings together such

seemingly opposite elements as sharply focused description and abstraction,

and objectivity and personal expression.

While the artists represented in the Yale exhibition vary greatly in their

application of these elements, they all operate within or against the terms

established by the notion of the Equivalent. In other words, they use the

abstract possibilities of the photograph for interior meanings.

Such artists as Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Ralph Steiner and Imogen

Cunningham emphasize the role of the viewer's perspective through a focus on

abstraction's potential to make strange what is really familiar. Strand's

photography, wrote Mr Cornell in his catalogue essay, was a revelation to

Stieglitz.

While "the close-up has become such a cliche of photographic practice ... it

is easy to forget how much it is a product of visual language invented for

modernist abstraction," Mr Cornell wrote. Remember, extreme close-up shots

were brand-new at this time. Strand and his contemporaries were the first

photographers whose images relied on their titles alone for viewers to know

what they were looking at.

"Strand's photographs were revolutionary in that they demonstrated how the

close-up could also involve viewers in the kind of disorienting perspective

that informed Stieglitz's distant views of sky and clouds," wrote Mr Cornell.

Minor White, Paul Caponigro, Ruth Bernhard and Jerry Uelsmann transform nature

into the realm of the uncanny by emphasizing the tensions between appearance

and reality, while Aaron Siskind, Carl Chiarenza and Emmet Gowin seize upon

the unexpected relationship between aesthetics and social realities to suggest

how the viewer's experience of nature and the self are cultural constructs.

Gowin's photographs from the air offer perspectives on "patterns of

destruction and disaster in the landscape that have been caused by human

intervention. Through these photographs, he exposes the tension between human

technology and the natural world," writes Mr Cornell.

Gowin's "Winter on the High Plains, Snow over Pivot Agriculture, near Liberal,

Kansas," for instance, demonstrates how even the seemingly benign effects of

agribusiness farming methods are altering the natural world in devastating

ways. By shooting from the air to the ground, Gowin has taken Stieglitz's

"Equivalents" theory and offers viewers a disorienting image in the reverse

manner; rather than shooting at the disorienting sky and its clouds, Gowin

offers a new approach to the landscape.

Ultimately, all such photographic images of natural phenomena reveal as much

about their viewers as they do about the photographers whose vision they

represent, says Mr Cornell.

"Alfred Stieglitz and The Equivalent: Reinventing the Nature of Photography"

is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with an essay by the curator.

It is available for $5 at the museum shop.

Yale Art Gallery has two remaining special programs in relation to the subject

of its current exhibition. On Wednesday, November 3, Patricia Willis will

offer an art a la carte talk entitled "Snapshots: Alfred Stieglitz and His

Circle." The program will begin at 12:20 pm. Ms Willis is the Elizabeth

Wakeman Dwight curator of American literature at Beinecke Library.

On Tuesday, November 9, at noon, history of art graduate student Cheryl Finley

will present "Alfred Stieglitz and The Equivalent: Reinventing the Nature of

Photography." The program will be repeated on Thursday, November 11, at the

same time.

Yale University Art Gallery is at Chapel and York Streets in New Haven.

Admission is free to the museum and its programs. Gallery hours are Tuesday

through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm; and Sunday, 1 to 6 pm.

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