Date: Fri 01-Oct-1999
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.