Yale Bulletin and Calendar

August 30-September 6, 1999Volume 28, Number 2



This image of a cloud-filled sky is part of Alfred Steiglitz's "Equivalent" series. Twelve works by Steiglitz and 32 works by other American photographers are featured in the Yale Art Gallery's new exhibition.



Exhibit features abstract photographs of the natural world world

When photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) turned his camera skyward to capture abstract images of clouds, he at first called these works "Music" and "Songs of the Sky."

He soon, however, began calling the images "Equivalents," saying of his work: "I have a vision of life and I try to find equivalents for it sometimes in the form of photographs."

A group of images selected from the series of 400 cloud photographs Stieglitz took between 1922 and 1931 forms the foundation of a special exhibit opening on Friday, Sept. 3, at the Yale University Art Gallery.

"Alfred Stieglitz and the Equivalent: Reinventing the Nature of Photography" features 12 works by Stieglitz and 32 by other American photographers, most of whom shared his vision of "pure photography." Stieglitz's "Equivalent" photographs come from the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, while the other works are from the permanent collection of the Yale Art Gallery. The show was organized by graduate student Daniell Cornell, the Florence B. Selden Fellow in the gallery's department of prints, drawings and photographs.

Stieglitz began his career by producing photographs in a style known as "pictorialism." According to Cornell, pictorialists attempted to create "evocative and mysterious" images that stressed composition and a soft focus to allow for the play of visual imagination. In these early images Stieglitz sought to record his personal feelings and responses, as well as to reproduce painterly effects through photographic means, explains Cornell.

In the 1920s, inspired by the artistic experiments of the European avant-garde, Stieglitz began seeking a different "visual vocabulary," says Cornell. Using a Graflex single-lens-reflex camera, he created small, carefully crafted, but very dramatic images of cloud-filled skies. By emphasizing the fields of light and dark through those black-and-white images, Cornell explains, Stieglitz explored the possibility of photography to create art that was abstract, rather than "illusionistically descriptive."

Stieglitz described his own artistic explorations in the following way: "There is a reality -- so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. That's what I'm trying to get down in photography."

While making no claim that Stieglitz alone invented abstract photography, Cornell asserts that "the notion of abstraction developed through the equivalents has been a central force in shaping one of the major innovations of American photographic practice."

The Yale Art Gallery exhibit traces the role of Stieglitz's "Equivalent" approach -- which brings together such seemingly opposite elements as sharply focused description and abstraction, and objectivity and personal expression -- in the history of ideas that have contributed to the definition of photography in 20th-century America, says Cornell. While all the artists in the exhibit vary greatly in their application of these elements, he adds, they all operate within or against the terms established by the notion of the Equivalent.

For example, such artists as Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Ralph Steiner and Imogen Cunningham emphasize the role of the viewer's perspective by using abstraction to make strange what is usually familiar. Photographers Minor White, Paul Caponigro, Ruth Bernhard and Jerry Uelsmann transform scenes from nature into uncanny images by exploring the tension between appearance and reality. Similarly, Aaron Siskind, Carl Chiarenza and Emmet Gowin examine the relationship between aesthetics and social realities to show how the viewer's experience of nature and the self are cultural constructs.

Ultimately, contends Cornell, these photographic images of natural phenomena reveal as much about their viewers as they do about the photographers who created them.

The graduate student will present a free art à la carte talk about the exhibit on Wednesday, Sept. 8, at 12:20 p.m. Other events scheduled in conjunction with the show include a symposium titled "Photographic Views: Developing a Language of Abstraction for Equivalents," on Friday, Oct. 1. Watch the Yale Bulletin & Calendar for news about this and other events.

"Alfred Stieglitz and the Equivalent" is on view through Sunday, Nov. 28. A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Cornell is on sale at the museum shop. The exhibition and catalogue were made possible by support from the Florence B. Selden Fund and the Mr. And Mrs. George Rowland, B.A. 1933 Fund.

The Yale University Art Gallery is located at the corner of Chapel and York streets. It is open to the public free of charge 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 1-6 p.m. Sunday. An entrance for persons using wheelchairs is located at 201 York St., with an unmetered parking space nearby on York Street. For information about access, call 432-0606. For general information about the museum, call 432-0600 or visit the website at www.yale.edu/
artgallery.


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