Alfred Stieglitz's Equivalents

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Carolyn Russo

2020

In Memory of my beloved friends Gregory K. H. Bryant, Herman L. Ross, and Chheang Por Van who have “slipped the surly bonds of earth” during the course of this thesis project.

ALFRED STIEGLITZ’S EQUIVALENTS: LANDSCAPE IN THE AVIATION AGE

Carolyn Russo

ABSTRACT

Between the years 1922 and 1935, American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) photographed over 300 images of clouds from his family’s property at Lake George in upstate

New York. About an hour’s drive north of Albany, Lake George experienced highly changeable weather systems and, so, was a fitting site for this extensive series, known as the Equivalents.

This thesis focuses on Set XX (1929), a sequence of nine photographs. Whereas a few sets include poplar trees or an indication of the ground, this set focuses almost exclusively on the sky.

The clouds themselves are unnaturally angled to the un-pictured horizon and—from photograph to photograph––they shift diagonally on their vertical axis. Scholars consider the Equivalents

Stieglitz’s most important late work and have read the images either symbolically or formally, but they have not considered the specific understanding of clouds in the early twentieth-century

America. Reading Set XX in relation to developments in meteorology and aviation in the 1920s, this thesis argues that the photographs represent the experience of flight. Throughout his career,

Stieglitz worked to champion photography as art, and ironically, drawing upon science enabled him to rival the aesthetic of landscape painting. Whereas nineteenth-century landscape paintings prioritized the horizon line and pictured their subject from a terrestrial perspective, Stieglitz used aeronautic thinking to picture humanity’s ascension into the sky. By invoking and reimagining the genre of landscape, Stieglitz posited photography as equivalent or perhaps even superior to painting.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I attribute this thesis to the encouragement and support of my art history advisor Dr.

Nicole Elder in the graduate art history program at American University. The concept for this thesis stemmed from a seminar paper and without her support, it would have remained an unpublished paper. I thank my Thesis Research Seminar professors Dr. Joanne Allen and Dr.

Andrea Pearson, my second reader Dr. Jordan Amirkhani and Dr. Juliet Bellow for their encouragement, reviews and recommendations. To my colleagues at American University and especially Michael Quituisaca, thank you for your support. I’m indebted to the scholarly research of Dr. Sarah Greenough on Alfred Stieglitz and for her publication of her Ph.D. dissertation

Alfred Stieglitz’s Photographs of Clouds, The Key Set–Volume I & II: The Alfred Stieglitz

Collection of Photographs, and also the published letters between Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia

O’Keeffe in My Faraway One.

At the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, I thank senior leadership members

Dr. Ellen Stofan, Chris Browne, Dr. Peter Jakab, and leadership in the Aeronautics Department

Russell Lee and Dr. Jeremy Kinney. Special thanks to Chris Cottrill and Phil Edwards at the

Smithsonian Library of the National Air and Space Museum for locating resources for this study.

Many thanks to my Smithsonian colleagues and fellows, especially Barbara Brennan, Dorothy

Cochrane, Dr. Martin Collins, Dr. Tom C. Crouch, Dr. David DeVorkin, Caroline Johnson, Dr.

Valerie Neal, Claire Rasmussen, Dr. Matt Shindell, Diane Tedeschi, and Michael Tuttle.

To my sons Maxwell and Jack Craddock, thank you for your understanding, love, and support on yet another project. Special thanks to my parents Joan Russo, John Russo, Kate

Russo, and to my family and friends Eva, Fred, and Cora Eberhard, Vincent and Aimee Russo,

Bob Craddock, Thanh Dang, Ramsey Gorchev, Reena Jehle, David Kressler, Christina

DiMeglio-Lopez, Lissa Masters, Elizabeth Pleeter, Anna Potts, Ana Schwar, and Emily Zaino. iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... vi

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 SPECTATORS OF THE SKY ...... 5

CHAPTER 2 REIMAGINING THE LANDSCAPE ...... 25

CONCLUSION ...... 43

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 45

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 48

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 1, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 45

Figure 2: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 2, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 45

Figure 3: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 3, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 45

Figure 4: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 4, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 45

Figure 5: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 5, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 45

Figure 6: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 6, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 45

Figure 7: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 7, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 45

Figure 8: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 8, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 45

Figure 9: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 9, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 45

Figure 10: Alfred Stieglitz, Winter on Fifth Avenue, 1893, photogravure (from Camera Work 12, October 1905, pl. 2) ...... 45

Figure 11: Alfred Stieglitz, Spring Showers, 1900/1901, photogravure (from Camera Work 36, October 1911, pl. 16) ...... 45

Figure 12: Alfred Stieglitz, In the New York Central Yards, 1903, photogravure (from Camera Work 20, October 1907, pl. 3) ...... 45

Figure 13: Alfred Stieglitz, City of Ambition, 1910, photogravure (from Camera Work 36, October 1911, pl. 1) ...... 45

Figure 14: Alfred Stieglitz, A Dirigible, 1910, photogravure (from Camera Work 36, October 11, pl. 8) ...... 46

Figure 15: Alfred Stieglitz, The Aeroplane, 1910, photogravure (from Camera Work 36, October 11, pl. 7) ...... 46

Figure 16: Alexander McAdie, Alto Cumuli, ca. late 1920s, in Alexander McAdie, Clouds (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1930), Plate XL, unpaginated. .. 46 vi

Figure 17: Alexander McAdie, Fair Weather Cumuli, ca. late 1920s, in Alexander McAdie, Clouds (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1930), Plate XIII, unpaged...... 46

Figure 18: Alto-Cumulus, late 1920s, in Whatham, Richard. Meteorology: For Aviator & Layman (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1930), 86...... 46

Figure 19: Airplane Observation Flight, U.S. Weather Bureau ...... 46

Figure 20: U.S. Air Service, American Expeditionary Force (AEF) Aerial Photo mosaic Brexbach River between Sayn and Grenzau, Germany 10-2-19-11A.M. 3500m-52cm Lens, 91st Squadron, Photo Section No. 2...... 46

Figure 21: Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George, New York, 1920, gelatin silver print, Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona ...... 46

Figure 22: Federal Aviation Administration Aerobatic Rules, APA Special Provision 2016...... 46

Figure 23: Multi-Tiered Sky Ways, illustrated by Guy Charette. Elizabeth Cameron, How Things Work: Flight (Alexandria, Virginia: Time Life Books, 1990), 102...... 46

Figure 24: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Hand and Wheel, 1933, gelatin silver print, Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ...... 46

Figure 25: Fedele Azari, Prospettive di Volo (Perspectives in Flight), 1926 ...... 46

Figure 26: Alfred Stieglitz, Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, No. 1, 1922, gelatin silver print, Photograph copyright Estate of Alfred Stieglitz/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Museum of Modern Art, New York ...... 46

Figure 27: Alfred Stieglitz, Songs of the Sky, 1924, gelatin silver print, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ...... 46

Figure 28: Thomas Cole, View on Lake George, 1826, Purchased through a gift from Evelyn A. and William B. Jaffe, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire ...... 46

Figure 29: Martin Johnson Heade, Lake George, 1862, oil on canvas, Bequest of Maxim Karolik, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ...... 46

Figure 30: John Frederick Kensett, Lake George, 1870, oil on canvas, The Brooklyn Museum . 47

Figure 31: Georgia O’Keeffe, A Celebration, 1924, oil on canvas, Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Seattle Art Museum, Washington ...... 47

Figure 32: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, 1930, oil on canvas, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe, National Gallery of Art, Washingtin, D.C. ... 47

vii

Figure 33: Arthur Dove, Sunrise, 1924, oil on wood, © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy of Terry Dintenfass, Inc., Milwaukee Art Museum, Michigan ...... 47

Figure 34: Arthur Dove, Foghorns, 1929, oil on canvas, © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy of Terry Dintenfass, Inc., Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado ...... 47

Figure 35: Alfred Stieglitz, The Net Mender, 1894, carbon print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 47

Figure 36: Edward Steichen, The Big White Cloud, Lake George, 1903, carbon print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection 1933, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ...... 47

Figure 37: Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George in Winter, 1926, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 47

Figure 38: Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George in Winter, 1926, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 47

Figure 39: Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George in Winter, 1926, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 47

Figure 40: Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George in Winter, 1926, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 47

Figure 41: Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George in Winter, 1926, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...... 47

Figure 42: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1892–1893, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ...... 47

Figure 43: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1892–1893, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ...... 47

Figure 44: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1892–1893, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ...... 47

Figure 45: John Constable, Cloud Study, 1822, oil on paper, laid on board, Courtauld Gallery, London ...... 47

Figure 46: John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London ...... 47

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INTRODUCTION

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) dedicated his career to championing photography as an artistic medium. He did so as a practicing photographer, gallery owner, writer, and publisher— making, showing, and describing photography as an expressive art form equal to or perhaps even superior to painting and sculpture. An early effort was his formation of the Photo-Secession in

1902, an affiliation of selected photographers with the mutual goal to promote the advancement of Pictorial photography.1 As editor of Camera Notes and publisher of Camera Work, Stieglitz published his own and other photographers’ images and writings on the medium. At his New

York galleries, he was the first to exhibit modern European art in America and promoted early

American modernist painters alongside photographers in an attempt to equate the two media.

Later in his career, while the American painters in his intimate circle were producing landscapes, portraits, and depictions of architecture, Stieglitz focused on the sky. Between 1922 and 1935, he made over 300 photographs of clouds from his family home in Lake George, New

York, a popular location for nineteenth-century landscape painters of the Hudson River School of painting; he titled the series the Equivalents.2

This thesis focuses on a select set of photographs in the Equivalents series known as Set

XX, which Stieglitz completed in 1929. All of the clouds in Set XX are alto-cumuli and look like

“high-heaps,” as their Latin name suggests. These compact rows of cloud clusters occupy the

1 In February 1902, the Photo-Secession was formalized with Stieglitz’s association of prominent photographers. Aside from Stieglitz, the Photo-Secession included Edward Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence White, F. Holland Day and several other leading photographers of the time. The group was modeled after other European secessionist groups but with a goal to set themselves apart from the restrictions of other photo salons, and promote the advancements of Pictorial photography. See Katherine Hoffman, Stieglitz: A Beginning Light (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 201–202.

2 There are approximately 334 clouds in the National Gallery of Art published Key Set Collection. See Sarah, Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set–Volume I & II: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1983),1007–1011.

atmosphere at 10,000 to 20,000 feet high. In Stieglitz’s photographs, they fill the frame running vertically or horizontally across the photograph with a disorienting effect.3 In all but the first image, no reference points are present, and the clouds are askew within the photographic frame; most are angled perpendicularly towards the un-pictured horizon and flipped along their vertical axis. Stieglitz’s approach to the composition of the images in Set XX departs in subtle but significant ways from his approach to other works in the Equivalents series, such as those that include trees or have portions of the landscape visible in the frame. The clouds in these works provide almost no secure point of orientation; as such, they mark a provocative shift in Stieglitz’s approach to his long-standing subject.

Scholars consider the Equivalents to be Stieglitz’s most important late works but disagree on the nature of their significance.4 Some scholars have read the photographs as references to spiritual states or to Stieglitz’s own emotions, while others locate them within the formalist narrative of Western modernism. In the first camp, Sarah Greenough argues that the Equivalents are the culmination of Stieglitz’s forty years as a photographer––a synthesis of all that he has learned about art and an expression of his “innermost feelings.”5 This premise is echoed in art historian Lauren Kroiz’s work, who interprets the Equivalents as Stieglitz’s own “private mystical language.”6

3 Toby Carlson, et al., An Observer’s Guide to Clouds and Weather: A Northeastern Primer on Prediction (Massachusetts: American Meteorological Society, 2014), 97.

4 Susan Lowe, Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 260.

5 Curator of Photography at the National Gallery Art in Washington, D.C. refers to Stieglitz’s biographical statements from his 1923 essay “How I Came to Photograph Clouds.” See Sarah Greenough, “Alfred Stieglitz’s Photographs of Clouds” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 1984), 4–9.

6 Kroiz argues for a reading of the Equivalents in relation to immigration and religious spirituality. See Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 125–126.

In a similar vein, scholars such as Judy Annear and Kristina Wilson relate the

Equivalents to various forms of spirituality, such as the organic forces found in nature or an obliquely defined “American spirit.”7 On the other hand, Rosalind Krauss and Daniell Cornell read the clouds formally, exploring the Equivalents’ contributions to the development of abstraction and the history of photography respectively. Rosalind Krauss posits Stieglitz’s framing of these compositions as key to their modernism.8 Daniell Cornell reads the series as a significant example of abstraction in nature photography.9

This present study, by contrast, takes its cues from the series’ subject matter and explores

Set XX in relation to developments in meteorology and aviation in the 1920s. In 1927, Stieglitz began tilting the camera 90° degrees or 180° degrees such that the clouds appeared on an angle or even perpendicular to the un-pictured horizon line. Key developments in aeronautical history help explain the significance of this re-orientation. In chapter one, I read the works in relation to these developments, which were of personal interest to Stieglitz, to argue that the photographs represent the experience of flight––a novel phenomenon at the time.

The second chapter explains Stieglitz’s investment in picturing flight, with a particular focus on the ways in which these photographs, like his other endeavors, served his efforts to frame photography as art. Reading the works in relation to earlier depictions of Lake George, I

7 Photography curator Judy Annear reads the clouds in “Clouds to Rain: Stieglitz and the Equivalents” as the spirituality found in nature and the organic link connecting the clouds with the rain drops or dew found on the ground. Annear attributes the “sparkle” in the raindrop or the twinkle in the eye of a portrait to the “meeting of generative forces.” See Judy Annear “Clouds to Rain: Stieglitz and the Equivalents,” American Art 25, 1 (March 2011):18. Kristina Wilson argues the Equivalents produce a “spiritual epiphany” and were formed in part by the engineered choices of works by Stieglitz in his galleries to create a cosmic environmental sanctuary. See Kristina Wilson, “The Intimate Gallery and the Equivalents: Spirituality in the 1920s Work of Stieglitz,” The Art Bulletin, 85, 4 (Dec., 2003): 746–762.

8 Rosalind Krauss, “Alfred Stieglitz: Equivalents,” October, 11 (Winter 1979): 135.

9 Daniell Cornell, Alfred Stieglitz and the Equivalent: Reinventing the Nature of Photography (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2009), 1.

argue that, in Set XX, Stieglitz used photography to reimagine one of the most prominent artistic genres in the American canon. Throughout his career, Stieglitz worked to champion photography as art and argued tirelessly to disassociate photography from its implications with mechanics and science.10 Ironically, drawing upon science enabled Stieglitz to rival the tradition of landscape painting. By adopting the mechanical point of view of an airplane, his unanchored depictions of the sky reimagine landscape for the aviation age. Whereas nineteenth-century landscape painting prioritized the horizon line, Stieglitz uses aeronautic thinking to refocus the landscape genre onto the sky. Thus, Stieglitz shifts traditional notions of perspective from a model anchored in the individual to one anchored in the machine. This shift enables Stieglitz to place photography in conversation with earlier artworks, like the paintings of the British landscapist John Constable and, so, locate photography within the classic genre of landscape.

10 Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial Photography,” In Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980),115–123. 4

CHAPTER 1

SPECTATORS OF THE SKY

The sequence of photographs that comprise Set XX suggests movement through the clouds. Stieglitz ordered the photographs to evoke a journey into the density of the clouds, each twist and turn imaging a different perspective on the sky. Photograph No. 1 offers a wide view of the sky and is the only image in the set with a definitive sliver of landscape at the bottom right of the frame (figure 1). In this photograph, wisps of light break through a partially open sky with dark cumulus clouds moving in a horizonal direction in front of the sun. The clouds in No. 2 through No. 5, advance to close-up tightly packed views of wave-like alto cumulus clouds

(figures 2, 3, 4, & 5). All hints of the terrain are completely eliminated. Whereas the clouds in

No. 1 are parallel to the horizon line, the clouds in No. 2 through No. 5 are vertical lines to the un-pictured horizon and shift diagonally to the right. The overcast sun is the only point of reference to the camera’s movement and the telling detail that reveals all of the photographs from the same patch of sky. The zoomed-in view of the clouds creates a new spatial dimension in a world void of terrain. Photograph No. 6 is a wider view of the sky and is the only horizonal composition in the series (figure 6). The clouds straighten out and, so, reverberate with those in

Photograph No. 1. The remaining three photographs in the series, No. 7 through No. 9 zoom back into the clouds for more disorienting diagonal views, but the placement of the sun shifts from the right side of the frame to the left (figures 7, 8, & 9). Overall, the series is a progression of varying perspectives from within the clouds.

My objective in analyzing this set of the Equivalents is to understand the sense of motion and disorientation that the sequence of the photographs evokes. Rather than look at each photograph individually or, conversely, look at all the Equivalents as a monolithic whole, this 5

thesis interprets Set XX on its own terms. What was the significance of depicting movement through clouds during Stieglitz’s era? Who else was picturing clouds during this time period––in both art and science––and why were clouds significant? This chapter establishes Stieglitz’s interest in clouds and argues that it emerged in tandem with the newest scientific developments in meteorology and aerology. The late 1920s witnessed aviation milestones that permanently changed human transportation and the ways scientists and artists perceived the sky. A new dimension of nature became accessible and thus ripe for investigation. Stieglitz seized this new uncharted territory in his Equivalents to represent the experience of flight in the aerial age.

Precursors to Flight

Stieglitz’s interest in clouds predated the Equivalents series. Like meteorologists,

Stieglitz recorded patterns in the sky, and as a child, he kept a diary with detailed notes on the weather.11 In his adult years, he opened several letters to his future wife Georgia O’Keeffe with weather observations. One letter from November 1916 begins: “The day has been still––white–– cold––sometimes fine mist––sometimes sleet…”12 A letter composed the previous month opens similarly: “Yesterday it suddenly began growing cold.––The wind veered from the Northeast to the Northwest without warning.––No rain. And from a bleak raw atmosphere arose a dry cold wind––a Northwester. And as the full moon came over the hills the sky was clear––& the temperature was falling fast.”13 Stieglitz’s description of the sky reads like a weather report.

Inclement weather was central to many of the atmospheric tableaux of Stieglitz’s early photographs. Winter on Fifth (1893) was taken during the great blizzard that passed through New

11 Greenough, “Alfred Stieglitz’s Photographs of Clouds,” 152.

12 Sarah Greenough, My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Vol. I., 1915–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 66.

13 Greenough, “Alfred Stieglitz’s Photographs of Clouds,” 152.

York City that year (figure 10). Stieglitz recounted the experience of making the photograph as a personal feat that he executed only after standing in the “blinding snow” for three hours, waiting for the perfect moment, when a stage coach crossed his path. This was one of his many winter scenes that he believed proved that good photographs could be taken during a “bad season.”14

Another work, Spring Showers (1900), is a street scene that draws a parallel between a street cleaner’s rounded posture and the bend of a nearby tree (figure 11). However, Stieglitz titled the photograph after the misty atmosphere and the reflections it fostered. In the photographs In the

New York Central Yards (1903) and City of Ambition (1910), steam and smoke emerge from the chimney stacks. These industrial exhalations blend seamlessly with the clouds above (figures 12

& 13). In these early photographs, Stieglitz merged technology and human activity with the atmospheric realm of the sky. His later photographs separate the two spheres.

A Dirigible and Aeroplane–– both of 1910––mark a significant shift in his work or, at least, his approach in picturing clouds (figures 14 & 15). As the titles of these photographs indicate, Stieglitz’s focus is modern flying machines and through them, he visualizes humanity’s ascension into the sky. Here, technology is a tool to explore a new terrain that formerly only winged creatures could access. Each photograph prioritizes the sky and includes only a sliver of treetops paving the way for Stieglitz’s later work. In the Equivalents, he eliminates flying machines altogether and focuses solely on the clouds themselves.

Meteorological Musings

Unlike the clouds in Winter on Fifth or even A Dirigible, the ones in Set XX are unmoored from the terrain below and have a disorienting effect. They appear as tightly packed vertical patterns of white puffs. In meteorology and aerology, the term for the type of cloud in

14 Hoffman, Stieglitz: A Beginning Light, 112.

this Equivalent series is alto cumulus, or “high heaps” in Latin. These clouds usually hover between 10,000–20,000 feet in the atmosphere. Alto cumulus clouds are sometimes referred to as

“mackerel clouds,” since they look like the scales of mackerel fish. They also often carry underlying warnings of meteorological transformation.15 Readers of the sky say, “Mare’s tails and Mackerel scales make tall ships lower their sails,” which means that these clouds often indicate a potential oncoming storm.16 Whereas, in the nineteenth century, meteorology was a language only for scientists, in the early twentieth century, through books, newspapers, and radio, it became readily available to a broader public.17 This emerging popular discourse provided a means by which those curious about the mysteries of the sky (such as Stieglitz) could learn about meteorology even if they worked outside the profession.

Stieglitz’s advanced understanding of the weather is made evident by the sets into which he divided the Equivalents. The sets correspond with the ways in which meteorologists classify clouds. Most of the over 300 photographs in the Equivalents series are organized into sets by cloud type. For example, the photographs in Set X (1927) are all of cumulus clouds, Set 152

(1927) are of cirrus clouds, and Set W (1929) depict alto cumulus clouds.18 Stieglitz’s titles for these sets mimic the letter-number combinations used in aerology, where letters correlate to different cloud types such as (Ci) for cirrus clouds or (A. Cu.) for alto cumulus clouds. Arabic numbers were added to the letters to define the density of clouds such as (0) meaning very thin

15 Toby Carlson, et al., An Observer’s Guide to Clouds and Weather: A Northeastern Primer on Prediction, 97–100.

16 Carlson, et al., 93.

17 Rachael DeLue, Arthur Dove: Always Connect (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 121.

18 Many sets in the Equivalents series are grouped by cloud classifications. See Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set–Volume II: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs, 701–703 and 733–735. 8

and irregular, (1) as thin but regular, and (2) defining rather dense.19 So, Stieglitz’s titles for the

1 1 5 20 Equivalents he made in 1929 are Set C2No. 1; HH ; K ; O2; Set LX1, Set2 LX; T2; W1; and F .

While Stieglitz’s titles were not disciplinarily accurate, it is clear that he borrows the mathematical structure of meteorological classifications for his own titles. The equation-like titles for the Equivalents are similar to meteorological equations found in the book The

Principles of Aerography (1917). The following is an example of aerographic language used in an equation:

. . . the mechanical equivalent of heat (sometimes called the work equivalent to

heat) (J) is 41,840,000, or one calorie equals 4.184 X 107 ergs, or 4.184 joules

when not done against gravity. This would raise a gram of air against gravity

426.8 meters. Joule’s equivalent, as it is often called, is connected with the

quantity of heat by the equation ML2T-2 which is equal to JH or JM0.21

Notice that the formula even includes the term “equivalent.” The equation includes both the main title of Stieglitz’s cloud series––the Equivalents––and the letters and numbers of his subtitles.

Not only, then, did Stieglitz’s photographs of clouds run parallel to the work of scientists, but his titles and numbering indicate that he was aware and wished to reference directly the burgeoning field of aerology.

19 Alexander McAdie, Clouds (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1930), 6–7.

20 Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set–Volume I & II: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs, 719, 722, 725, 727, 731, 733, & 747.

21Alexander McAdie, The Principles of Aërography (Chicago, New York: Rand McNally & Company, 1917), 38.

Aerology

In the early twentieth century, Stieglitz was not the only person interested in picturing the clouds. Meteorologists such as Alexander McAdie (1863–1943), the director of the Blue Hill

Meteorological Observatory at Harvard University, produced technical cloud studies and photographed and catalogued clouds from 1913 to 1931. He was also a prolific publisher of books about clouds including The Principles of Aerography (1917), which was used as a scientific resource for weather reports and forecasts.22 Like Stieglitz, McAdie also photographed cumuli clouds but his results were drastically different. McAdie’s alto cumulus clouds were pictured in situ, within the landscape, and appear parallel to the horizon (figure 16). Indeed, alto cumuli are normally parallel to the topographic features below and contain wave patterns that appear in right angles to the direction of the wind.23 McAdie’s fair-weather photographs offer wide views of the sky with the clouds located horizontally in the picture frame (figure 17).

Meteorologists like McAdie photographed clouds with an emphasis on their taxonomy and classification.24 His cloud photographs are methodical, objective studies pursued in a scientific manner.

22 The title page of Clouds lists McAdie as the “A. Lawrence Rotch Professor of Meteorology, Harvard University, Director of Blue Hill Observatory, Fellow of American Meteorology Society, Fellow of Royal Meteorology Society, Former professor of Meteorology U.S. Weather Bureau, Lieut. Commander and senior aerographic officer overseas U.S. Navy Reserve (1918) Member of International Cloud Committee.” See Alexander McAdie, Clouds, Plates XL, XLI unpaged. Also see “Blue Hill Observatory and Science Center” Historical Timeline, last modified 2019, https://bluehill.org/observatory/about-us/historical-timeline.

23 Carlson, et al., 97.

24 Jennifer, Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 155.

These images were ideal visual tools for identifying clouds and understanding more about weather and its patterns.25

Visual references such as McAdie’s books were also critical resources for pilots in the early twentieth century.26 In the handbook manual Meteorology: For Aviator & Layman (1930), meteorologist Richard Whatham includes visual studies of clouds similar to McAdie’s photographs which were essential for pilots to study and memorize as part of their training

(figure 18). Whatham speaks to early aviators with conviction about the importance of learning how to read the weather:

The aviator is particularly interested in knowing as much as possible about the

weather as it will influence his flights, his hours aloft, his gas consumption, his

courses and drift therefrom, his clothing and comfort. His safety often depends

upon anticipating weather conditions that lead to fog, rain, snow, hail,

thunderstorms, ice formation on wings and so on. His progress in aviation

demands a complete understanding of the atmosphere, especially the troposphere,

for this is his highway.27

25 McAdie was both a scientist and promoter of meteorology and his research efforts were disseminated to scientific communities as well as the general public in his books. His books ranged from published research in the pages of The Principle of Aërography (1917), to a small field type format titled Cloud Atlas (1923) that one could keep in their pocket for weather watching to larger portfolio style books such as Clouds (1930). The black and white photographs of clouds presented in all the books are captioned with the correct meteorological nomenclature to illustrate the differences between cloud classifications. In some cases, photographs by different photographers were also featured in McAdie’s books albeit to cover the weather he was not able to photograph. Weather phenomena such as fog, snow, lightening, and weather charts and diagrams are also included in the books.

26 Studying clouds and predicting the weather also remains an essential skill for pilots today.

27 Whatham was the Official Meteorologist of the U.S. Army, British Royal AirForce, and was also the instructor of meteorology at New York University and the Curtiss Wright Flying Service Ground School. See Richard Whatham, Meteorology: For Aviator & Layman (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1930), V.

By contrast, the photographs of the Equivalents in Set XX are not suitable for training purposes because of their close-up and disorienting views. Stieglitz’s clouds are from the point of view from how they might have been seen from the air.

As much as aviation responded to developments in meteorology, the reverse was also true. In the 1920s, the field of meteorology shifted and expanded to accommodate rapid developments in aviation.28 The simple classifications of clouds used by pilots were not sufficient for long range forecasts, so aerologists started collecting data from the clouds in the air from aircraft. For example, aerologists systematically measured clouds for water content, temperature, height, velocity, airflow and their direction to predict oncoming weather.29 As such, aviation played a major role in the newest developments of meteorology by obtaining critical data from the air. In 1925, the Weather Bureau and the US Navy joined efforts and began making flights from the Naval Air Station in Anacostia, Washington, D.C. with meteorograph equipment attached to the wings of airplanes. These flights initially flew at 10,000 feet and relied on two sources to retrieve data. One was the Marvin meteorograph weather instrument and the

28 See Alexander McAdie, A Cloud Atlas (Chicago, New York: Rand McNally & Company, 1923), 3.

29 “In a way the clouds have been numbered ever since Luke Howard in 1802 proposed to divide them into the three great classes; stratus, or layer; cumulus, or heap: and cirrus, or feather; with modifications of these. The scheme was simple and answered very well for a number of years, but is now felt to be inadequate for the needs of airmen and aerographers. Meteorologists of many countries modified the original classification. But today a new order is coming, for we must now do more than merely look at a cloud. We must measure it, and interpret the cloud in terms of water content and temperature. Above all, we must know its direction and velocity, the duration and extent of air flow at the that height, and what such conditions foretell as to the coming weather…. We spoke above of the ability of man to go to the top if and even beyond cloudland. After long years of waiting it has come about that men are able to leave the earth, soar to the region of the highest cloud, and drop back to earth with the grace of a bird on a wing. Finally, and this is no less wonderful than the other achievements, the clouds are numbered and men are beginning to imitate the way of a bird in the air. They can indeed fly upside down, something which birds cannot do: and they can fly far above the lower clouds, far above the habitat of birds, and a few of the most daring airmen have actually flown above the highest cloud; indeed, beyond where clouds, eve the thinnest and lightest can be formed. His practical conquest of cloudland, and he ability to explore the region where the cloud form, he is on the verge of great advances in connection with all the process of clouds condensation in the free air. Increasingly the use of the air as a means of transportation will require and lead to a detailed knowledge of all the secrets of cloud building.” See McAdie, A Cloud Atlas, 3.

other was the pilot’s observations. These flights became known as apobs for “airplane observations,” in which both pilot and observer carried out the mission of the weather flight

(figure 19).30 The advent of such flights marked an important innovation in forecasting, for it was the first time aerologists gathered essential weather data in the upper atmosphere with airplanes.31 Previous to apobs flights, meteorologists photographed clouds from the point of view from the ground with cloud patterns level to the horizon. Thus, the study of clouds shifted from the ground to the sky. Stieglitz’s manipulation of his compositions in the Equivalents suggests that he was aware of these innovative modes of weather forecasting and their impact on the relationship to flight.

In comparison to McAdie’s photographs of clouds, Stieglitz’s are disorienting and evoke the perspective of clouds from the apobs flights. The vertical lines in Set XX pivot along their axis and change directions. Without a horizon line as a guide, all sense of distance and direction are lost. Scholars have addressed the disorienting qualities of the Equivalents with terms that resonate with the experience of flight, although unintentionally. Art historian Daniell Cornell comments on their spatial disorientation, which “complicates the viewer’s referential understanding.”32 Some pilots and passengers experience vertigo and spatial disorientation in flight without a fixed sightline on the horizon, and as their normal perception and comprehension

30 Joseph Gordon Vaeth, Weather Eyes in the Sky (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1965), 9–10.

31 Charles J. Maguire, Aerology: A Ground School Manual in Aeronautical Meteorology (New York and London: McGraw Hill Book Company, Inc., 1931), viii.

32 Art historian Daniell Cornell refers to the Equivalents in similar terms to the pilots. He claims, “Stieglitz further adds to this sense of spatial disorientation through the sensation of movement suggested by the blurred streaks of clouds and his diagonal composition. This abstract quality of the image is heightened by another strategy that relates to the defamiliarization and the way it complicates the viewers referential understanding.” He also adds, “Through these photographic effects, Stieglitz’s image evokes the mysterious qualities of the sky and clouds that make them such rich symbols for an experience of the uncanny.” Yet, Cornell doesn’t associate the clouds to the experience of flight. See Cornell, Alfred Stieglitz and the Equivalent: Reinventing the Nature of Photography, 13.

of their environment becomes confused, they lose situational awareness.33 Cornell however is strictly referring to the formal qualities and abstractions of the photographs.

Rosalind Krauss described Stieglitz’s working method using aviation-like terms and references. In a discussion of Stieglitz’s approach to photography, Krauss writes: “The risk is often about working blind, with no certainty that anything will guarantee success. If we have not seen the risk that accompanies the vertigo in Stieglitz’s cloud photographs, then we have not seen the photographs.”34 Like Cornell, Krauss was responding to the disorienting qualities of the photographs. Examining the experience of flight can put these qualities into visual and historical perspective.

Radical Innovations

During the making of the Equivalents, major aviation milestones originated from airports in close proximity to Stieglitz’s New York City residence, making his familiarity with them all the more likely. One of the greatest developments to which Stieglitz would have been privy was a ground-breaking experimental test for “blind flight.” Flying blind without instruments not only hampered a pilot’s ability to fly and navigate an aircraft safely; it also played a major role in the way pilots felt physically. Without visual cues, a pilot cannot be sure in which direction the aircraft is flying, and she or he also lacks spatial orientation and experiences intense vertigo and, often, motion sickness.35 On September 24, 1929, General James “Jimmy” Doolittle (then an

Army Lieutenant) purposely experienced blind flying with new instruments on a proving flight.

33 Fred. H. Previc and William R. Ercoline, Spatial Disorientation in Aviation (Reston, Virginia: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., 2004), 167.

34 Krauss, “Alfred Stieglitz: Equivalents,” 140.

35 Timothy P. Schultz, The Problem with Pilots: How Physicians, Engineers, and Airpower Enthusiasts Redefined Flight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 44–68.

Working in collaboration with the Guggenheim Flight laboratory, U.S. Army Air Corps,

Department of Commerce, and other engineering entities, Doolittle made a test flight in a fully covered cockpit.36 Doolittle took off, flew a course, and landed the plane without a visual reference outside. The flight was navigated by instruments alone and paved the way for flying at night and in the clouds and thus marked a pivotal navigational development in aeronautics for civilian, military, and commercial aviation.37 It helped launch the development of new aeronautical technologies for navigation and also instruments that alleviated the psycho- physiological effects on the pilot.

Another milestone that originated from Stieglitz’s home state of New York is Charles

Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight. In May 1927, Lindbergh was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. His flight departed from Roosevelt Field in New York and landed approximately 33 hours later in Paris.38 Overnight, Lindbergh became an international icon, and symbolized humanity’s conquest over nature for his daring feat. New York City greeted him with a parade, and the crowds were estimated to over 4 million––almost equal to the number residents living in the city.39 Certainly, Stieglitz would have been attuned to the significance of this flight.

36 Airplanes up until that time always had a way of seeing outside the cockpit either from a window or at the very least, through a periscope. Doolittle’s flight however did have a safety co-pilot in case of an emergency.

37 Benjamin W. Bishop, Jimmy Doolittle, the Commander Behind the Legend Drew Paper 17, (Maxwell AFB AL: Air University Press in February, 2015), 16.

38 “Charles Lindbergh flies alone from Long Island, non-stop, to Paris,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration / National Weather Service Historic Timeline, accessed August 10, 2019, https://www.weather.gov/timeline.

39 Joseph J. Corn, Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 18–27.

Lindbergh also experienced “blind flight” over the Atlantic Ocean on his way to Paris.

He remarked on the “strain of the mind” during blind flight and how the mind must move as

“mechanically as the gyroscope,” and the muscles must move as “unfeelingly as gears.” He says,

“If the senses get excited and out of control, the plane will follow them, and that can be fatal…with the plane falling dizzily and the needles running wild.”40 During the same flight he wrote, “Has the sky opened only to close again? Will they finally merge, these clouds, to form one great mass of opaque air? Must I turn back? Can I still turn back, or have I been lured to this forbidden temple to find all doors have closed? North, south, and west, clouds rise and tower; only the lighted corridor ahead are clear.”41 The Weather Bureau recommended Lindbergh to delay his flight for 12 hours, but he didn’t heed the warning and wait.42 As predicted, he ran into dangers of fog and rain.43 Encounters with weather such as those described by Lindbergh from his aircraft resonate with the close-up views of clouds in Set XX.

Stieglitz systematically navigated the camera through and around the clouds in Set XX as if he were a pilot. As the sequence begins in photograph No.1, the ground is in view for take-off with a wide angle and the expanse of the sky open to explore. As the series progresses, the ground disappears and the site line elevates higher into the clouds. Once in the clouds, the vertical orientation pivots back and forth with movements reminiscent to the angles of a pilot

40 Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 294.

41 Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis, 308-309.

42 “Charles Lindbergh flies alone from Long Island, non-stop, to Paris,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service Historic Timeline, accessed August 10, 2019, https:///www.weather.gov/timeline.

43 Encounters with weather such as those described by Lindbergh, resonate with the sequencing of Set XX. Beginning with No. 1, the sky is open with a dark cumulus cloud passing in front of the sun and mackerel clouds in the distance. As the series progresses from No. 2 though No.5, the densely packed bulbous clouds cover the sky. The view of these clouds blocks all visual references and impedes a sense of distance and direction. In photograph No. 6, the clouds open up into a horizontal composition, only to close again in photographs No. 7 through No. 9.

when “banking” or turning an airplane in flight. The placement of the sun in the photograph serves as a position marker and shifts from the right side of the frame to the left in the sequence of the photographs. In photograph No. 9, it even appears as though the view of the clouds is from upside down. Stieglitz’s vertical heaps of alto cumulus clouds are reminiscent of the turbulence pilots experience when flying through them.44 Instinctively, Stieglitz stays with the series until he captures a brighter section of the sky and an opening break in the clouds to pass through to reach a clearing where turbulence is left behind. Stieglitz’s photographs conjure a journey. With distinctive movements and disoriented views, Set XX evokes the transformative innovation of the early twentieth century—the experience of human flight.

Witnessing Cloudland

Stieglitz experienced flight in an airplane for the first few times during the summer of

1929 and was captivated by the sensations and views, which he describes emotively in letters to

Georgia O’Keeffe and others.45 In a letter to O’Keeffe he says, “Off we went. And the flying was fine but no great thrill. But suddenly the pilot flew higher & turned in a circle––[and] made a great swoop . . . the mountains looked upside down––the Lake was running downhill––It was a

44 Vertical currents lie under the alto cumuli and cause “bumpy” air below them. Whatham describes “[The] moist warm air rising to a level where it becomes cool and condenses, thereby setting up convectional currents and unstable conditions” within the clouds. See Richard Whatham, Meteorology: For Aviator & Layman, 87.

45 Stieglitz flew for the first time in July 1929 and writes about it twice in two different letters to O’Keeffe on July 6: “––I engaged an airplane for myself––just had to be alone––one with cabin––that flies to New York & back at weekends––and I flew…I knew I’d do it this summer…It was an extraordinary & quieting experience…It’s a great machine…My walking into that airplane cabin alone & not a bit nervous.––That flight.––So quiet. So natural as if I have flown all my life… See Sarah Greenough, My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Vol. I., 1915–1933, 464–467.

grand sensation––beat anything imaginable . . . A kiss from the upside-down hills . . . ”46

While these exact aerobatic maneuvers described by Stieglitz can’t be proven to have taken place, he at least imagined them. The diagonal lines and the visualization of vertigo represented in the photographs of Set XX echo Stieglitz’s description in the air over the Hudson River Valley.

In fact, Richard Whelan writes in his biography of Stieglitz that the artist “loved” seeing the Hudson River Valley and New York City from the air and told a friend that, “when he was flying along he thought what a wonderful way it would be to die if the pilot, not knowing that he

[Stieglitz] had a bad heart, and went up to a very high altitude.” In a letter to Arthur Dove,

Stieglitz writes, “If I were young enough, I’d certainly get a machine.”47 Thus, Stieglitz’s interest in flying was not purely academic––he experienced it himself, and these experiences fundamentally transformed his depiction of the sky, the weather, and flight.

The dawn of the aviation age provided much fodder for artists. Aerial visions allowed artists to reimagine spatial relationships in nature and radical visions of the land.48 In

Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest, art historian Jason Weems notes that “artists were foremost among those excited by the airplane’s potential to reconceive the world and its image.” In the essay Influence of Aviation on Art: The Accentuation of

46 Other portions of the same letter in reference to flying dated August 8, 1929, read: “After lunch––What a morning. All sorts of activities. The chiefest was another fly to the skies. Donald (Davidson) and I were walking to the Village when I said: Donald, want a fly with me? He was ready. So we jumped into a plane––It was such a grand day… Donald very excited––said he wouldn’t forget it in a million years…I seemed like an older rounder. It was really incredible. We’ll fly soon. Have a real fly.––You & I––very close––You’ll love it…When I came home I was asked how about my heart. And my answer was: To hell with my heart––I don’t understand such language––That heart touched the blue of the sky…See Greenough, My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Vol. I., 1915–1933, 511.

47 Richard Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography. (Boston, New York, Toronto, London: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 515.

48 See Jason Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 137–138.

Individuality” artist, pilot, and writer Stanton Macdonald-Wright noted that “artists’ inherent outlook” would change as a result of flight.49 Macdonald-Wright’s avant-garde rendition of an aircraft and aerial view in his painting Aeroplane Synchromy in Yellow and Orange (1920) attests to the influence in his own work. It’s not a coincidence that Stieglitz acquired Mcdonald-

Wright’s painting for his personal art collection.50 The airplane became an essential factor in shaping Stieglitz’s vision and the artists working both outside and inside of his network.

Stieglitz’s former gallery partner, artist and photographer Edward Steichen, made photographs from airplanes and played a significant role in the field of aerial reconnaissance photography during World War I. As an aerial war photographer in charge of the aerial photography unit for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in Europe, Steichen made photographs for the military but remained open to the artistic possibilities with aerial photography.51 Both men employed similar aeronautical perspectives and photographic strategies, but their work speaks to their respective artistic and technical goals. Steichen utilized a true aeronautical perspective from the flying machine and imaged the land below. Stieglitz on

49Joseph J. Corn, Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900–1950, 36. Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s essay “Influence of Aviation on Art: The Accentuation of Individuality” was originally published in Ace: The Aviation of the West 1: No.2 (September 1919): 11–12.

50 Aeroplane Synchromy in Yellow and Orange (1920) was one of two of Mcdonald-Wright’s paintings that Stieglitz acquired and the painting remained in Stieglitz’s private art collection up until his death. O’Keeffe donated the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 1949. See Lisa Mintz Messinger. Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 152–153.

51 Aeronautic historian and curator Von Hardesty chronicled Steichen’s war photography efforts beginning with his enlistment in 1917, in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Steichen’s ambitions of becoming a “latter day Mathew Brady” in ground combat was unrealized with his promotion to head up an aerial photography unit for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in Europe. In this capacity, he managed the aerial units and transportable darkrooms that were set up in the field. He also pioneered a systematic program in the military for aerial reconnaissance photography. Steichen wrote to Stieglitz in January 1918, from France and described his efforts of setting up the aerial photography unit similar to their labor together of the creation of Gallery 291. See Von Hardesty, Camera Aloft: Edward Steichen in the Great War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), ix–xvi, 9, 46.

the other hand conceptualized an aeronautical perspective, and reimagined the landscape for flight.

Steichen’s aerial photographs from over France and Germany showed enemy territories, communication lines, and the before and after images of destruction of the landscape from bombing raids. After the war, Steichen pulled together a sample of prints made by his unit to demonstrate the range of creative possibilities made from the air.52 Some of the prints are photo mosaics of a sequence of smaller photographs to show a specific region such as the Aerial Photo mosaic of the Brexbach River in Germany (figure 20). The mosaic shows the lines and patterns of the landscape in different shades of black and white tones, and although artfully pieced together, the image serves as a document for a specific military assignment. In this sense,

Steichen’s photography from airplanes was a true mechanical perspective.

Although Stieglitz didn’t photograph from airplanes like Steichen or his Unit (most likely because of the expense and his heart condition) he employed some of the same technical strategies to make the Equivalents and yet departed from them as well. For example, he used similar filters as Steichen and switched to a smaller, more portable camera.53 For the Equivalents in particular, Stieglitz set aside his cumbersome eight by ten-inch camera for a hand-held four by five-inch single-lens Graflex.54 With the mobile camera, Stieglitz could aim and shoot in a

52 Hardesty, Camera Aloft: Edward Steichen in the Great War, 185.

53 Hardesty, Camera Aloft: Edward Steichen in the Great War, 82.

54 A revelation for Stieglitz was the use of the hand camera. Admittedly, he first rejected it. Initially, he denounced the utilitarian and simplistic appeal in that every “Tom, Dick, and Harry” or in other words, unskilled photographers could use it. For Stieglitz, it became synonymous with bad pictures. See Alfred Stieglitz, “The Hand Camera–It’s Present Importance, 1897,” in Photographers on Photography, ed. Nathan Lyons (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1966), 108. But eventually he realized the practicality of the camera for his own work and became a supporter of the new equipment. In his writings about the hand camera in 1897, he asserted the camera should be waterproof to handle any type of inclement weather and that the mechanics should be easy to use, “thus causing any unnecessary swearing, and often the loss of a precious opportunity.” See Alfred Stieglitz, “The Hand Camera–It’s Present Importance, 1897,” 109.

similar fashion to aerial photographers. Greenough notes that this camera “enabled him to abandon traditional perspectives and explore different ways of seeing the world.”55

Indeed, Stieglitz explored a new world. In contrast to the aerial photographers with their cameras and perspectives aimed towards the ground, Stieglitz pointed his camera upwards

(figure 21). This approach enabled Stieglitz to move his sightline above the horizon line, and examine another realm of the landscape. Stieglitz used the muse of the airplane and actions of aerial photographers like Steichen to conceptualize his true aeronautical perspective—which further enabled him to represent the aerial dimension of flight.

Interpretations of Flight

At this juncture, the concept of airspace may best demonstrate the visual dimension of where pilots live and work in the sky. Pilots fly in a three-dimensional space at different altitudes in sections across the sky. Their perspective can be illustrated best by an aerobatic box where aerobatic pilots fly their maneuvers within a measured perimeter of the sky (figure 22).56

Another example of dimensional airspace are the multi-tiered air routes or “aerial super highways” that are defined lanes of airspace that crisscross the sky for commercial aviation

(figure 23).57 Aeronautical technology allows humans to fully explore the airspace and utilize aircraft in ways inconceivable to other creatures of the sky. Unlike birds, airplanes travel at super speeds and even fly upside down.58

55 Greenough, “Alfred Stieglitz’s Photographs of Clouds,” 155–156.

56 “Federal Aviation Administration Aerobatic Rules,” https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/airshow/media/APA_ACB_Special_Provisions_2016.pdf

57 Elizabeth Cameron, How Things Work: Flight (Alexandria, Virginia: Time Life Books, 1990), 102.

58 Alexander McAdie, A Cloud Atlas. (Chicago, New York: Rand McNally & Company, 1923), 3.

Stieglitz’s diagonal and vertical lines of the Equivalents embrace the aeronautical mechanics of an airplane. Americanist Lauren Kroiz relates the diagonal lines of the Equivalents to the speed of the car evoked by the lines in Stieglitz’s photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe, Hand and Wheel (1933) (figure 24). She notes that “Stieglitz did not simply turn against new modern technologies following World War I but attempted to engage them.”59 Indeed, he did. He not only pictured such machinery, as Kroiz argues; he imitated it. Stieglitz became like an airplane with his aeronautical perspective and his movements through the clouds. His adaptation and viewpoints of the airplane were a way to further his artist goals with photography. Other artists of his era also depicted the characteristics and modern technology of the airplane, but as a means to further their ideological and political goals.

The Italian Aeropittura Futurists conceptualized the idea of the airplane through their art to evoke speed, power, and aerial perspectives. Flight maneuvers such as spins and dives through the air were depicted using a range of avant-garde strategies.60 Some of the early Aeropittura artists included Benedetta-Marinetti née Cappa (1897–1977) Gerardo Dottori (1884–1977),

Vittorio Corona (1901–1966), Enzo Benedetto (1897–1977), Giacomo Balla (1871–1958),

Roberto Marcello Baldessari (1894–1965), Tato-Guglielmo Sansone 1896–1974) and Fedele

Azari (1896–1930). Fedele Azari, already a Futurist, was one of the first Aeropittura artists and is considered a precursor to the official movement established by the Manifesto dell’Aeropittua

Futurista in 1929.61 Azari applied his background as a military pilot officer and aerial

59 Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle,126.

60 Futurists depicted aspects of flight with a range of abstract styles such as Cubism, Constructivism and Surrealism. See Emily Braun, “Shock and Awe: Futurist Aeropittura and the Theories of Giulio Douhet” in Italian Futurism 1909–1944: Reconstructing The Universe, ed. by Vivian Greene, (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2014), 272.

61 Bruno Mantura, Patrizia Rosazza-Ferraris, and Livia Velani, Futurism In Flight: Aeropittura Paintings and Sculpture of Man’s Conquest of Space (1913–1945), (Rome: De Luca Edizioni d’Arte, 1990), 16. 22

photographer in World War I to his art, specifically Perspectives of Flight (1926)––a brightly colored, multi-dimensional collision of geometric forms that evokes an aerial perspective (figure

25). Triangular shapes in yellow, red, and orange form city buildings and rooftops. Swaths of earth toned greens and browns make up a modernized view of a farmer’s field, while vertical and diagonal lines in blue and green intersect to mimic the speed of airplanes and flight paths across the sky. Perspectives of Flight is a dynamic composition of speed and power that meets the goals of the Aeropittura artists. The lines in Perspectives of Flight resemble the vertical lines and perspectives in the Equivalents, but the goals behind these works of art set them far apart.

Whereas the airplane was initially associated with freedom and liberation, the Futurists used aircraft as a symbol of power and propaganda for their destructive motives as Fascists.62

The Futurists used the airplane technology in their art as a vehicle for change, but a change for violence, a political revolt, and a departure from healthy ideologies of man and nature.63 Stieglitz on the other hand drew on the technology of aeronautics and flight to make changes in his pictorial goals and to fulfill his ambitions to champion photography as an artform.

Stieglitz gained a reputation for mitigating photography’s association to the mechanical

62 See Silk, “Our Future Is in the Air: Aviation and American Art,” 251–253.

63 “But what attracted Marinetti above all in the flying machine was its potential for liberating humanity from its two great enemies, time and space. By consuming and thus killing space, the propeller frees man from the servitude of time and makes it possible for him to multiply infinitely his life, thus transforming him into a god. There was no better example of man’s rebellion against the divinities that had for so long enslaved him than his determination to conquer the air. Marinetti celebrated the flying machine as a means of escaping from the constraints oppressed by nature. For him, flight was a realization of man’s age-old Promethean dream of conquering the elements and achieving godhood. While waiting for the coming war with Austria, there was nothing more interesting on earth than “the beautiful death” of aviators. It would be a mistake to think that Marinetti had written his Futurist allegories with tongue in cheek. He took them––and meant them to be taken––seriously. In his view technology did not merely offer a new topic for literature; it had replaced literature and rendered the romantic and sentimental sensibility of the nineteenth century obsolete. Men would merge with motors. Their will would become like steel. Their vital organs would become interchangeable as a flying machine’s spare parts. The motor was man’s “perfect brother” because it was capable of eternal youth.” “We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and we say without smiling that wings sleep in the flash of man.” See Robert Wohl. A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908–1918 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 143.

properties of the camera. The influence of the airplane however brings change to Stieglitz’s own ideologies on photography, lifting the medium to even greater heights.

Conclusion

The early-twentieth century was an era when meteorology and aviation became part of mainstream culture. Stieglitz actively engaged in weather watching from childhood into his adult life and professional career, and often incorporated weather themes into his earlier work.

However, unlike the Dirigible and Aeroplane in 1910, his photographs of 1929 depict the sky alone. With the dawn of aviation, new developments in meteorology influenced flight technology and vice versa. Stieglitz worked parallel to the meteorologists and aerial photographers at the front lines of these fields but took an alternative approach to picturing the sky. With their unnatural perspectives, the Equivalents are not scientific studies, but imaginative evocations of flight. He pictured the clouds as they would appear to someone in the midst of them. The clouds shift and turn in the same manner as they might appear to a pilot or passenger in the sky. In chapter two, we will examine his pictorial and professional interests in such work.

CHAPTER 2

REIMAGINING THE LANDSCAPE

I detest tradition for tradition’s sake; the half-alive; that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, tradition; superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder–of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated.64

—Alfred Stieglitz, quoted by Dorothy Norman

Chapter one argues that the photographs in the Equivalents series Set XX represent the novel experience of flight. Stieglitz’s insight into the burgeoning fields of meteorology and aviation in the 1920s offered him a new approach—a new perspective—on picturing clouds. The varied directional views of the altocumulus clouds result in a disorienting effect—as if they were photographed from an airplane. Painters, sculptors, and scientists considered photography a mechanical medium because it relied on a mechanical device and the resulting photographs were considered objective views.65 Ironically, Stieglitz’s adoption of aeronautical thinking opened a new artistic pathway. The Equivalents presents perspectives related to two machines—the camera and airplane—seeming to contradict Stiglitz’s efforts to distance modern photography from science and technology. Instead, Stieglitz’s aeronautical thinking gave him a unique way to locate photography within the landscape genre and thereby further his efforts to champion photography as art.

64 Dorothy Norman, Aperture, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1960, p. 25. See Nathan Lyons, Photographers on Photography. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1966, 108.

65 Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial Photography,” In Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980),115–123.

Chapter two situates the conventions of landscape painting as context, and contrast, for the photographs in Set XX taken at Lake George—a region long associated with the Hudson

River School. Stieglitz’s work departed from the conventions these nineteenth-century artists had developed to depict this landscape. Although his approach was strikingly novel, it aligned more conceptually with earlier traditional landscape painters, particularly the British painter John

Constable, who from 1821 to 1836 produced a renowned series of cloud studies. Stieglitz’s

Equivalents in Set XX, anchored in a classical subject and concerns in art history, served his goal to further photography as art—and supersede paintings long associated with the landscape genre.

The Equivalents as Landscape

Stieglitz’s family property at Lake George provides the setting for the entire Equivalents series from 1922 to 1935.66 The rural setting was free of New York City’s skyscrapers and the large swath of sky was perfect for photographing fast changing weather systems. Stieglitz used the landscape at Lake George as a testing ground for photography throughout his career. Writing about the region in a 1925 letter to American novelist Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), he mused: “I have been looking for years––50 upwards––at a particular sky line of simple hills–– how can I tell the world in words what that line is––changing as it does every moment.––I’d love to get down what ‘that’ line has done for me––Maybe I have––somewhat––in those snap shots

I’ve been doing the last few years.”67 The letter reveals Stieglitz was working within the landscape genre and thinking about the changing horizon, both physically and metaphorically.

66 See Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set–Volume I & II: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs,1007–1011.

67 John Szarkowski, Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 29. See original source: Alfred Stieglitz to Sherwood Anderson, July 5, 1925. Alfred Stieglitz Archive, Yale University. Quoted in Greenough and Hamilton, Photographs and Writings, 210.

In the earliest of the Equivalents cloud series, Stieglitz approached the landscape from an anthropocentric point of view on the ground. The scene in the Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud

Photographs, No. 1. (1922) is a mountain view in silhouette with a dark sky of threatening clouds overhead (figure 26). Pictured at the bottom of the horizontal composition is a small white

A-frame house positioned slightly off center. It reads like a safe haven from the ominous clouds and a place to shelter from an oncoming storm. The visible side of the roof and silhouetted tree branches in the foreground are indicators the photograph was made from the ground or a neighboring hill. In another early Equivalent photograph titled Songs of the Sky (1924) the composition is anchored in a small hilltop at the bottom of the frame. The scale of the hill is reduced to a low-lying mound compared to the entirety of the composition which is filled almost completely with sky (figure 27). A massive “silver-lined” back lit dark cumulus cloud stretches the entire length of the horizontal frame with daylight and wisps of cirrus clouds present in the distant background. These photographs borrow such conventions of traditional landscape painting as a distant horizon, and dramatic lighting in the sky.68

The photographs in Set XX appear to depart from this tradition––and, indeed in some important ways they do––but they are fundamentally landscapes. The first photograph in Set XX locates the entire project within the genre. In photograph No.1 (figure 1), a silhouetted sliver of a hilltop appears as a darkened corner at the bottom of the frame, which is otherwise dominated by black and white cumulus and “mackerel” clouds resembling the pattern of fish scales. The partial hilltop anchors the corner of the photograph and serves as a visual cue or leap from the land into the expansive field of the sky. In photograph XX No. 6, an undefined dark area that could be a

68 These views are reminiscent of the powerful skies in significant nineteenth-century landscape paintings, such as Thomas Cole’s Kaaterskill Falls (1826) and Sanford Robinson Gifford’s A Coming Storm, (circa 1863–1880) with coherent views of mountainous terrain.

sliver of the ground appears at the bottom of the frame (figure 5). This photograph is the only horizontal composition in the series and the ambiguous dark area serves as a mediator between the ground and the sky. Stieglitz could have omitted indications of the earth all together with a nudge of the camera. But he chose not to. He thus wanted landscape to remain in the framework in which the Set XX series was seen.

Rejecting Tradition

Stieglitz was not the only artist to depict Lake George, but his approach markedly differed from those of his predecessors. His interest in the area renews that of the Hudson River

School artists such as Thomas Cole (1801–1848), Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), and John

Frederick Kensett (1816–1872). These artists and others established the aesthetic model for

American landscape painting, often depicting panoramic views of nature in New England and

New York’s Hudson Valley region. Lake George was an important location and popular subject for their work. The lakes, mountainous terrain, and fast changing atmosphere served as the ideal foundation for sublime and picturesque landscapes.69 Distinctly anthropocentric, nineteenth- century landscape paintings established the pictorial model Stieglitz worked against.

Each of these artists negotiates humanity’s relationship with nature.70 In View on Lake

George (1826) Thomas Cole presents the lake’s sprawling backwoods with mountains in the distant background and a pathway in the foreground. The path is blocked by meticulously

69 Historian Tim Barringer offers definitions of the sublime as “dangerous and excessive aspects” of a landscape painting whereas the picturesque resembles pleasing aspects to the natural environment—“so appealing that it resembled a picture.” Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime, Landscape Painting in the United States 1820–1880 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 10, 21.

70 Art historian Angela Miller in The Empire of the Eye argues the narratives of these categories of sublime and picturesque served to civilize the new Republic with a national narrative that “reinforced moral and social hierarchies.” See Angela L. Miller. The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 273.

rendered fallen trees and jagged rocks (figure 28).71 This sublime scene presents obstacles and challenges for a person to navigate their way through with a goal to reach fairer weather. Martin

Johnson Heade’s Lake George (1862) offers a calmer scene of the lake in shades of turquoise and pink that stretch across the water (figure 29).72 In the distance, a line of mountains establishes the horizon line between the sky and water. A figure with rolled up trousers prepares for an outing in a row boat and serves as a stand-in for the viewer. As an idyllic postcard-perfect environment, Heade’s painting is considered a picturesque landscape. The inclusion of the figure, boat, and supreme weather conditions are reminders of or even an advertisement of Lake

George’s association with tourism. John Frederick Kensett’s Lake George (1870) places the viewer at the water’s edge with barely an opening to navigate the shore (figure 30).73 The soft quality of the light and atmospheric luminosity is a prominent feature of Kensett’s work.

Whereas the sublime and picturesque explored man’s relationship with the land, power and God,

Kensett’s luminous painting offers a quality of timelessness.74

71 The pathway is visible, but presents a challenge for the traveler on the ground. The water is portrayed with reflections of both light and dark areas mirroring the fair sky on the distance horizon and ominous clouds directly above. Vertical clouds hang in strokes of mauve to indicate torrential rain in the middle ground of the painting.

72 In the distance, a line of mountains establishes the horizon and create the break between the sky and water. The shores of the lake are clear from debris and the ground serves as an open landing for the boat to enter the water. With knickers pulled up to stay dry, one can imagine the rower soon comfortably situated in the boat for a relaxing day on the Lake. The sky indicates good weather with white cumulus clouds in the background void of darkness or threats of rain. Head’s Lake George, 1862 is an example of the picturesque.

73 One would have to walk amongst the boulders to find a spot of dry land. Kensett’s dark clouds drape the sky but areas of sunlight escape to illuminate the distant grass covered mountain. Trees bend in opposite direction with highlighted leaves glistening in the wind. Movement is captured by the blowing leaves and ripples across the water.

74 Angela Miller describes luminous painting like Kensett’s as having “embraced a visual universe purged of time, progress, and history.” Angela L. Miller. The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875, 288.

If the Hudson River School painters perfected the conventions of landscape genre painting at Lake George, the Equivalents eradicated them.75 Stieglitz’s portrayal of nature inverts the established traditions of the Hudson River School. He eliminates the horizon line and obviates a terrestrially-based narrative. Former painters depicted the lake with seemingly objective views with precision detail of the surrounding nature in the trees, rocks, and water as a person would see them from the ground.76 Stieglitz overrides the former landscape conventions and replaces the human perspective with a perspective made possible by a flying machine.

Indeed, Stieglitz’s Equivalents show viewers what they could not see or appreciate with the naked eye.77

Modern Landscapes

Other artists shared Stieglitz’s revisionist approach to the landscape genre. In particular,

Stieglitz worked alongside early modern American painters Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove in his search to amend outdated narratives and insert the photographic medium into the genre.

75 Americanist Maggie Cao in The End of Landscape in the Nineteenth Century America, traces the changes in nineteenth-century landscape painting from the practiced traditions to modernity and defines three major conventions of the former. Cao describes them as having a “narrative accessibility,” the ability to traverse the terrain in the landscape; a connection of power and ownership or economic gain within the landscape scene; and an “objectivity in the portrayal of nature.”75 Aside from these conventions, scientific observations and sketches of botanicals and geology were an integral component of their paintings.75 Cao notes the nineteenth-century artists also created panoramic views as constructions “to reinforce ties between land and capital through the inclusion of an economically minded gaze.” And even more so, locations on the East Coast were tied to growing tourism, such as the local of Lake George.75 See Maggie M. Cao The End of Landscape in the Nineteenth Century America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 11–14.

76 The Equivalents of Set XX, is a direct confrontation with the sky leading to tightly packed clouds. The sun is the only position marker and the clouds themselves are the final destination. Set XX is a dizzying experience and disoriented point of view of the landscape. The luminosity of the sky originates as backlight from a hidden overcast sun. Time is marked throughout the series with the movement in relation to sun in each frame. History does not stand still through Stieglitz’s luminosity, but moves forward and backward and upside-down. The Equivalents are subjective, pathless from a terrestrial standpoint, with a narrative that uses aeronautical thinking to divorce the sky from the land.

77 Stieglitz’s portrayal of nature is subjective with his twists and turns of the camera that create a sense of movement and vertigo. His scenes are void of figures or modes of transportation such as the figure and boat in Heade’s painting. By inverting the former conventions with the elimination of the horizon line and non-anthropocentric views, Stieglitz nonetheless inserts his work into the landscape tradition. 30

O’Keeffe and Dove rendered subjects in the landscape with a superhuman perspective.

Stieglitz’s Equivalents complement the work of Dove and O’Keeffe with their beyond-human perspectives on the landscape at Lake George. In concert, these artists’ perspectives allowed viewers to see and experience imperceptible elements in nature, while modernizing the landscape genre in the process.

Lake George was also a significant location for Georgia O’Keeffe. Throughout the early years of their relationship and marriage, O’Keeffe painted from the Stieglitz property most summers and autumns. O’Keeffe shared many of the same views of the surrounding water, mountainous terrain, and changing skies from the expansive property.78 Some of her paintings are in direct conversation with Stieglitz’s Equivalents and parallel his work. Among these works is A Celebration, (1924) which represents a vertical composition of a variety or “party” of different cloud formations congregated in the same space of the sky (figure 31).79 Other works are depictions of subjects in nature from the lake surroundings which escaped Stieglitz’s attention such as the common Jack-in-the-Pulpit wild flower that served as one of O’Keeffe’s many muses for her larger-than-life renditions of the region’s flora. In Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3

(1930) of this particular series, O’Keeffe offers a wide angle view of the precious plant’s exterior

(spathe) and emphasizes the flower’s miniature lined pattern with bold stripes. For Jack-in-the-

Pulpit No. IV (1930), O’Keeffe zooms into the hidden interior of the plant and reveals an

78 Erin B. Coe, Gwendolyn Owens, and Bruce Robertson, Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 20–21.

79 The painting is like Stieglitz’s Equivalents with a sole focus on the clouds and sky. Abstracted forms of white swirls and different sized puffy forms stand in for accurate cloud classifications. Although, O’Keeffe’s orientation of clouds conjure Alexander McAdie’s clouds in their parallel orientation to imagined topographic features below. O’Keeffe’s modernist landscape departs from the Hudson River School with her abstracted forms and the omission of the horizon line. Instead, her forms convey the invisible traces of cloud vapor transformation always present in the landscape but not always seen.

unfamiliar close-up view of its center (figure 32). The rounded spadix or spike in the middle of the flower becomes a solid tunnel shape in colors of blue and violet. This perspective places the spectator inside of the flower for a view of another world—or perhaps how an insect would experience this sight in nature. O’Keeffe’s paintings offer a language for vision—a way of seeing that exceeds human vision.80

Arthur Dove also sought to picture the landscape in New York and Connecticut in ways that went beyond what the eyes could see. In Sunrise (1924), the sun is a series of semi circles of bright yellows and reds. As the layers expand outward, the colors intensify and translate into the powerful, physical radiating energy of the earth’s closest star (figure 33). In Fog Horns (1929),

Dove attempts to depict sound waves from a small boat, and renders them as pulsating color shifts within three concentric circles over the water in Long Island Sound (figure 34).81 Like

O’Keeffe, Dove also translates nature’s essential and unrecognized elements. Americanist art historian Rachel DeLue describes Dove’s work as an “impulse to render in visual form the nonvisual or phenomena not perceivable by the unassisted human eye.”82

Stieglitz and his circle of artists were pushing the landscape genre to see the world in new ways. Some scholars attribute the shift in modern landscapes away from traditional modes of

80 O’Keeffe describes her own work: “Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all of your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don’t.” See O’Keeffe’s writings associated with vision plates 23–31, 38– 42 in Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: The Viking Press, 1976). O’Keeffe’s interiors of flowers have also been popularized and promoted as highly gendered but not by her own accord. See Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 101.

81 DeLue links the spherical diagrams used to illustrate barometric pressure and air flow systems found on U.S. Weather Bureau maps as a direct link to the reoccurring circular patterns or concentric circles in Dove’s art in paintings such as Fog Horns, 1929. “With circles representing everything from barometer pressure and wind systems to the structure of the earth and the architecture of the cosmos, it is no wonder they wound up an essential motif for Dove.” See Rachael DeLue, Arthur Dove: Always Connect, 141.

82 Rachael DeLue, Arthur Dove: Always, Connect, 16.

landscape convention as a need to adapt under new notions of nature. Former cultural functions of the landscape such as “spatial, economic, and environmental conditions” of American land were no longer relevant. Nineteenth-century painters such as the Hudson River School painters identified the landscape genre with nationhood, morality, and a self-reflection of the country’s broader goals.83 While those claims are true, it is important to consider how Stieglitz and his artists departed from convention and what aspects of nature they chose to highlight instead.

O’Keeffe and Dove examine humanity’s relationship with the environment—in terms of the body—and render nature with superhuman perspectives. In Painting Gender, Constructing

Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics art historian Marcia

Brennan notes their perspective fostered a strategy to place the viewer “within” the painting.84

Stieglitz’s perspectives of the sky are in concert with these artists. His views of nature in Set XX position the spectator inside the clouds with a perspective beyond a human vision—and instead with a machine’s point of view. Thus, this perspective is critical to his insertion of photography into the modern landscape genre.

Alfred’s Fight

Stieglitz’s focus on clouds as subjects not only inverted the landscape genre but it also served his ongoing goal of positing photography as art. Throughout his career, Alfred Stieglitz adopted and experimented with new photographic styles and techniques that would legitimize the mechanical medium’s artistry, creativity, and craft. Photography was regarded by traditional artists as an objective, mechanical and reductive medium, void of the ability to render content

83 See Maggie M. Cao, The End of Landscape in the Nineteenth Century America, 4–10.

84 Referring to O’Keeffe and Dove, “Both artists seemed to cultivate a sense of identification between the viewer and their works by positioning the spectator as somehow within the painting themselves.” Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics,117.

subjectively or with artistic intentions––and was not considered an artistic language equivalent to painting and sculpture.85 As curator John Szarkowski states, “Photography was born modern. Its problem, in relation to the world of high art was not to become modern, but to become respectable, and it was to this rather servile goal that Stieglitz dedicated his energies for more than twenty years.”86 A survey of his previous efforts helps to reveal how the Equivalents served his agenda. Indeed, as Stieglitz himself noted, “As always, without a break, from 1883 in Berlin on, I was fighting for photography.”87

In the late 1890’s Stieglitz brought together the Camera Club of New York and the

Society of Amateur Photographers and formed the Camera Club, the members of which aimed to further their ambitions as photographers and to advocate photography as an artform, on par with the traditional media like painting and sculpture.88 Stieglitz reached another milestone in 1902 with the formation of the Photo-Secession. Modeled after European secessionist groups, the

Photo-Secession’s goal was to set itself apart from the other photo salons and promote the advancement of “Pictorial Photography.” Aside from Stieglitz, the Photo-Secession included members Edward Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence White, F. Holland Day and several other leading photographers of the time.89 These artists created photographs that foregrounded the role of the hand in order to distance photography from its mechanical associations.90

85 See Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg, 115– 123.

86 John Szarkowski, Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George, 21.

87 See Alfred Stieglitz, “Four Happenings–1942,” in Photographers on Photography, ed. Nathan Lyons (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1966), 119.

88 See Alfred Stieglitz, “Four Happenings–1942,” 122–123.

89 See Katherine Hoffman, Stieglitz: A Beginning Light, 201–202.

90 Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial Photography,” 116.

One of Stieglitz’s earliest photographs, The Net Mender (1894) offers a quintessential example of a Pictorial landscape (figure 35). In this work, in order to mimic the look of a painting or drawing, Stieglitz adjusted or manipulated the camera lens for a softer focus. In addition, he produced the image using a carbon printing technique which renders a softer image because of its transfer process and chemical make-up which differs from the sharper appearance of a gelatin silver print.91 The blurred foreground and background and monochromatic shading resemble a pencil drawing more so than a photograph. Edward Steichen used similar techniques in landscape photographs such as The Big White Cloud, Lake George (1903) where the foreground is blurred and details in the water and background are painterly and non-descript

(figure 36).

91 “Unlike silver and platinum printing methods that rely on the light-sensitive properties of metal salts to form a metallic image, the carbon process depends on the light sensitivity of dichromated gelatin. This material hardens in proportion to the amount of light it receives, forming an image that consists of pigment in gelatin. To make a typical carbon print, a sheet of paper is coated with a solution of gelatin, potassium dichromate, and pigment. Once dry, this light-sensitive “carbon tissue” is placed in contact with a negative and exposed to light, locally hardening the carbon tissue. The exposed tissue is then transferred to a paper support by wetting both papers, placing the tissue face down onto the new paper, and squeegeeing the pigmented film into firm contact. Under water, the exposed carbon tissue is carefully peeled away. The unexposed pigmented gelatin dissolves in the bath, and the positive carbon print is revealed on the new paper support.” See www.nga.gov/research/online-editions/alfred-stieglitz-key-set/practices- and processes/carbon-print.html (accessed April 19, 2020).

Pictorialist photographers made strides to distinguish the medium from its origins in science, but they did so by imitating painters.92 It remained to be seen and demonstrated what photography, as a medium, was uniquely poised to bring to the artistic table in the hands of its practitioners.93

Soon after the formation of the Photo-Secession, the Pictorialists were called into question for attempting to replicate the effects of painting. They responded by moving away

92 Stieglitz’s Pictorial photographs helped him to create the appearance of a painting, but later, his photographic series enabled him to pursue comparable goals with Monet. One project is a series of six photographs believed to be made in 1926 that were taken from the same spot at different times of the day and potentially during different seasons (figures 37–41). Stieglitz’s working methods to photographing landscape in these photographs were indeed influenced by pictorial artists in the way changes of light, time, and the atmosphere were captured in the series. All of the photographs are horizontal compositions, contain a tree at the left side of the frame, a foreground of the land, middle ground of hills, and the background of the sky. Change of lighting in the clouds and ground are the first noticeable aspects of the images. The first image of the series starts off with a dark foreground that fills nearly half of the frame, from bottom to the middle horizon (figure 37). The sky above is the other half of the frame with dark clouds above. In the second image the foreground is lower and the sky above fills three quarters of the frame (figure 38). While the constant reference point in the image is the tree, the lighting on the clouds and ground change, and the ground shifts and becomes smaller and smaller as the series progresses. Although Stieglitz’s images are framed in the same location—the horizon line shifts and encompasses more of the sky as the series progresses. The frame of the last image is filled almost entirely with sky. This concept applies to the Equivalents series which relies on the grouping of photographs instead of a single image. Sequencing had already been established by the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840–1926) with his series of the Rouen Cathedral (Cathédrales de Rouen), 1892–1893 series (figures 42,43, &44) and for his landscapes. His predecessor was the serial work of Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) with his landscape prints of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji taken during different seasons and weather conditions. See Nina Kalitina and Nathalia Brodskaia, Claude Monet (New York, Parkstone International, 2011), 131. In 1892, Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral from an apartment window from across the cathedral and captured the façade during different times of day and under various lighting conditions. See Nina Kalitina and Nathalia Brodskaia, Claude Monet, 137. Monet’s paintings of the same subjects of city views, poplar trees, and haystacks, at different times of day and under different weather conditions rely on the formalities of color and luminosity as individual works. Shown apart from each other, the subjects didn’t offer a narrative of time and light. See Jason Kass, “Cognitive Aspects of Pictorial Address and Seriality in Art: A practice Led Investigation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southampton, United Kingdom, 2017), 44. Stieglitz’s six images of Lake George, 1926 follow Monet’s formula and shown together offer a narrative of time and light in the landscape. Sarah Greenough also recognizes a pattern between Stieglitz’s and Monet’s processes and makes a comparison to Stieglitz’s cityscape photographs of New York City from the window of his Shelton Hotel residence. Greenough’s assessment argues the window frame acted as a device to “stabilize the composition” to focus on the changes of light on the subjects and to impose order in Stieglitz’s overly chaotic emotional life. See Sarah Greenough, “Alfred Stieglitz’s Photographs of Clouds,” 177. Rather than a correlation to his emotional life, I argue Stieglitz’s camera already sets the parameters for a framing device and Monet was one of his inspirations for capturing the changing atmospheric conditions and the sequencing of the Equivalents. The Equivalents were meant to be seen as groupings and began with his earliest sequence Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs that was exhibited in 1923. Sarah Greenough, “Alfred Stieglitz’s Photographs of Clouds,” 188. Stieglitz’s serial work in landscapes at Lake George is extensive and is a dominant formal feature of the body of Equivalents. Working in a series enabled Stieglitz to pursue comparable atmospheric goals to Monet.

93 Alan Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 116.

from handmade techniques to focus on photography’s distinctive or “straight” attributes.94

Straight photographers manipulated neither their negatives nor their prints and relied strictly on the tonal values and sharpness unique to the medium. Sharp focus, pristine printing, and seemingly objective views have come to define Straight photography and the definitive modernist photograph.95 Stieglitz began working in this “straight” manner in approximately

1916. In a letter about his conversion to Straight photography, he wrote his friend and noted

English photographer R. Child Bayley and relayed, “…Not a trace of hand work on either negative or prints. No diffused focus, Just the straight goods…”96

With their sharp focus and unmanipulated negatives and prints, the Equivalents are perfect examples of straight photography.97 Straight photography posed challenges for his audience to see the sharp cloud photographs in the Equivalents series as art. Stieglitz expressed these concerns in his essay How I Came to Photograph Clouds (1923) for Amateur

Photographer and Photography, and wrote, “My photographs look like photographs—and in their [the viewers] eyes therefore can’t be art. As if they had the slightest ideas of art or photography . . . My aim is to increasingly make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won’t be seen—and still everyone will never forget them

94 See Kroiz,Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle, 11–12.

95 Kroiz also notes, “The aesthetics of straight photography as an artistic medium, although often categorized later as apolitical, were initially inflected by contemporaneous discussions of race and nationality and debates about assimilation and pluralism.” See Lauren Kroiz,Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle, 12– 14.

96 Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Straight Photography https://media.artic.edu/stieglitz/straight-photography/#_ftn2. Original source see Alfred Stieglitz letter to R. Child Bayley, Nov. 1, 1916, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, box 4, folder 88.

97 As 4x5” contact prints, the full contents of the negative are in view, and the composition is devised entirely under the viewing hood of the camera, rather than later in the darkroom.

having once looked at them . . .”98 As a strategy to champion photography as art, Stieglitz first anchored modern photography with earlier examples of the classical subject and practices already established in art history. Then, paradoxically, he broke those traditions in favor of a more stark and modern aesthetic.

Art, Science, and Clouds

Stieglitz’s Equivalents departed from recent conventions in American landscape painting with the erasure of the horizon line and representation of flight, and instead resonated with even earlier work, particularly the cloud studies of the British landscape painter John Constable

(1776–1837). Constable painted and sketched renderings of “cloud studies” and approached his art through the lens of science in order to accurately portray the sky in his landscapes. In 1836,

Constable lectured, “Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not the landscape be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?99 His advocacy to unite the disciplines of art and science may have initially irked Stieglitz, who spent his career distancing photography from associations to science.100 Ironically, Stieglitz’s merging of art and science with the Equivalents furthered his own artistic goals.

98 Stieglitz’s concerns about how his clouds would be perceived were noted in his 1923 essay “How I Came to Photograph Clouds.” Stieglitz says, “Only some Pictorial Photographers when they came to the exhibition seemed totally blind to the cloud pictures. My photographs look like photographs—and in their eyes therefore can’t be art. As if they had the slightest ideas of art or photography—or any idea of life. My aim is to increasingly make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won’t be seen—and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them. I wonder if that is clear.” Alfred Stieglitz, “How I Came to Photograph Clouds–1923” In Photographers on Photography, ed. by Nathan Lyons, 110–112. Original see Alfred Stieglitz, “How I Came to Photograph Clouds,” Amateur Photographer and Photography Vol. 56 No. 1819, p.255.

99 Mark Evans, Constable’s Skies: Paintings and Sketches by John Constable, (New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2018), 12.

100 Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial Photography,” 116.

Stieglitz and Constable shared comparable interests in meteorology and both made extensive series of clouds from a single location.101 Positioning himself at Hampstead Heath, about 8km north-west of London, from 1821–1822, Constable recorded varying atmospheric conditions as painted or sketched cloud studies, with a systematic approach similar to scientists of his day. His cloud studies were unfinished works and used to render accurate sketches for later finished paintings. In works like Cloud Study (1822), he depicted clouds in their parallel position to the topographic features below in dabs and brush strokes of turquoise blue and white paint.

Constable rendered fair-weather cumulus clouds in neat rows to portray rapid movement across the canvas from left to right with potential wind currents. Highlights and shadows on the cloud forms also appeared consistent with the sun as a light source. His placement of clouds mimicked a parallel alignment above an imagined horizon line seen in meteorological photographs like

Alexander McAdie’s clouds. Constable’s weather diary references “Fine with Flying Clouds” although his clouds strictly correlated to the terrain (figure 45).102 An interest in portraying clouds accurately stemmed from his interest in meteorology but also from a desire to accurately portray the correlation of clouds to the ground.103 With a systematic approach, Constable began

101 Positioning himself at Hampstead Heath, about 8km north-west of London, from 1821–1822, he recorded varying atmospheric conditions, with a systematic approach similar to present day scientists Beverley A. Boudreau, “John Constable’s 1821 and 2822 Cloud Studies: The Artist as a Scientist,” Weather 53 (October 1998): 358.

102 Constable notes the details of the clouds on the back of the painting as, “looking South brisk Wind at East Warm & fresh 3 oclo [o’clock] afternoon.” Evans, Constable’s Skies: Paintings and Sketches by John Constable, 89.

103 An accurate rendering of the sky also completes the horizon line and binds the atmosphere to the landscape, an essential component to landscape compositions up through the nineteenth century. Meteorologist John Thornes took note of Constable’s clouds for their harmony between the sky and landscape after the exhibition of this work at the Royal Academy in 1821. Another viewer, criticized the same painting noting the one of the clouds was too dark which was also an impetus to change his viewing practices with a more scientific approach to his clouds studies. See Evans, Constable’s Skies: Paintings and Sketches by John Constable, 18.

his study of the sky during the summer of 1821 and noted the endeavor in a letter to his friend

Archdeacon John Fisher that year, writing:

I have done a good deal of skying…That landscape painter who does not make his

skies a very material part of his composition––neglects to avail himself of one of

his greatest aids. Sir Joshua Reynolds speaking of the ‘Landscape’ of Titian &

Salvator & Claude–– says ‘Even their skies seem to sympathise with the

subject’….Certainly if the sky is obtrusive (as are mine) it is bad, but if they are

evaded (as mine art not) it is worse, they must and always shall with me make an

effectual part of the composition….Even our common observation on the weather

of everyday, are suggested by them but it does not occur to us . . .104

The letter makes reference to the significance of clouds in art history but also states Constable’s intention to integrate weather studies or “science” to further his artistic goals in painting. For example, in The Hay Wain, (1821), Constable painted clouds in the lower atmosphere of the sky to serve as directional aids for illumination, wind currents, reflections in water bodies on the ground and blowing tree branches (figure 46).

It’s no surprise that Constables’ concerns with accurate renderings of the atmosphere coincided with the popularization and the expansion of scientific interests in the sky. His cloud studies were made at the same time meteorology evolved into a profession in England. The development of a standard cloud classification system (still in use today) and new understandings of atmospheric electricity such as lightning and the effects on cloud forms and

104 “It will be difficult to name a class of Landscape, in which the sky is not the ‘key note,’ the standard of ‘Scale’ and the chief ‘Organ of sentiment’…. The sky is the ‘source of light’ in nature—and governs everything…” In a letter to Archdeacon John Fisher from October 1921. See Evans, Constable’s Skies: Paintings and Sketches by John Constable, 19–20.

precipitation were new discoveries and influenced his depiction of clouds.105 Constable’s habitual practice of extensive sketches resulted in an expertise in meteorology and legitimized his references to science in his art.106 The discoveries in meteorology and their relationship to effects on the “ground” in Britain in the early 1800s were akin to the advancements in meteorology for the “air” a century later in America when Stieglitz pursued the Equivalents.

Respectively, their cloud projects reflected the meteorological developments of their day.

Stieglitz’s Equivalents suggest a cultivated parallel to Constable’s cloud studies and the elder artist’s investment in meteorology, art and science. While many critics and artists considered photography to be mechanical and degraded it as such, Stieglitz embraced the camera’s meteorological potential and aligned it with historical precedents. Initially, Stieglitz’s mechanical perspective and associations to science seem contradictory to the goals of art photography. However, an aeronautical perspective benefited from the meteorological interests and science of his own day—clouds seen from the air. With Straight photography and through the eyes of science and technology, Stieglitz conceived an experience of flight and reimagined the landscape. At the same time, he positioned photography as art. Perhaps, Stieglitz’s photographs of the Equivalents are equal to or even supersede Constable’s painted clouds.

105 The son of a miller, Constable was a natural reader of the sky having grown up in the countryside, but supplemented his education of meteorology with intensive studies, primarily through the works of meteorologists Luke Howard (1772–1864) and Thomas Forster (1789–1860). Luke Howard, coined the ‘the father of meteorology’ offered a systematic classification of clouds and weather in The Climate of London in 1818, which grounds many of the classifications still in use today. See Evans, Constable’s Skies: Paintings and Sketches by John Constable, 10.

106 For instance, certain types of clouds such as his favorite, the Cumulus cloud, were formed in the lower atmosphere with directional wind currents close to the ground, and could be reflected in landscape below. See John Thornes, “Constable’s Clouds,” The Burlington Magazine 121:920 (November 1979): 701.

Conclusion

Chapter two points to the connections between technological milestones of Stieglitz’s era, notably meteorological advancements and human flight, and his intentional shift of his camera away from the ground and towards the sky. Depicting flight conceptually through his sequence of cloud images enabled Stieglitz to posit photography as an innovation in the landscape genre and further its position as an art form. His early Pictorial landscapes aimed to align photography with landscape painting—to imitate it—but the later Equivalents, imbued with aeronautical thinking, aimed to transcend and reimagine the landscape genre. Reading the Equivalents in their relationship with art and science in the landscape genre allowed Stieglitz to champion photography as art—and even supersede important subjects and practices in art history.

CONCLUSION

This study provides new insight into the career of Alfred Stieglitz and his mature work, namely some of the three-hundred Equivalents photographs taken at Lake George, New York.

Rather than analyze the Equivalents series as a monolithic whole, I focus on the sequence of nine seminal photographs of clouds in Set XX, taken in 1929, and locate their significance in relation to previously unrecognized contexts. Although Stieglitz has been well studied and interpreted by other art history scholars, this thesis examines the influence of aeronautical thinking and landscape painting on his creativity and career. It also reveals how paradoxical or complicated he was as he embraced aspects of science while rejecting technical understandings of photography, both adapted and rebelled against traditions in landscape painting, and ultimately created a distinctive style of artistic landscape photography set in the sky. As a result of this original research and assessment, we can now better appreciate how this body of work—the stunning and sometimes perplexing series of clouds in Set XX—served Stieglitz’s ongoing goal to champion photography as art.

Reading Set XX in the socio-historic moment of the late 1920s reveals the relationship of the Equivalents to the bourgeoning scientific-technical fields of meteorology and aviation, and how they played an essential role in shaping Stieglitz’s vision. Indeed, scholars have looked to

Stieglitz’s biography or histories of modernism for interpretations of the cloud photographs.

Scholars have recognized Stieglitz’s cloud interests from childhood weather diaries, atmospheric

Pictorial photographs, and poignant meteorological descriptions in correspondences. But they have not considered the impact of Stieglitz’s sustained interest in weather and flight on the

Equivalents. This study is grounded in visual analysis of the photographs, but explains them and, more specifically, their disorienting views in relation to Stieglitz’s knowledge of meteorology

and experience with aviation. The overlooked fact of his first flying experiences, his familiarity with contemporary meteorological advancements, and the birth of modern air travel while he was making Set XX offer important new evidence and call for a fresh evaluation of the cloud photographs, which this thesis provides.

Although other photographs in Stieglitz’s oeuvre (not addressed in this study) directly acknowledge other forms of technology and their relationship to humanity and nature—stage coaches, trains, steam ships, cars—there are only two known images of flying machines. One might ask, why didn’t Stieglitz make more photographs of aircraft if he was interested in flight?

It wasn’t the technology itself that appealed to him but the perspectives and experiences that it made possible and what they could do for photography itself. Instead, he took a leap higher—and conjured flight itself through the views of clouds as seen from an aircraft in their midst. He made the airplane or pilot the point of view, so his clouds photographs conveyed the visual and physical experience of flight far more evocatively than photos of flying machines. This aeronautical vision adds another dimension to the Equivalents that have been heralded as his best work. He must have known that images of clouds as he conceived them, not airplanes, would better convince the world that photography could be art.

Aeronautical perspectives allowed Stieglitz to unmoor the clouds and erase the horizons of the Hudson River School of landscape painting. It permitted him to join modern landscape painters in providing super human views of nature. Stieglitz’s alignment of the Equivalents with the classical subjects and concerns of the genre, namely the clouds of John Constable, enabled him to appropriate influences from the sciences of depicting skies and weather, and to rival art historical landscape painting in the process. Aeronautical thinking opened a pathway for Stieglitz to chart new territory for photography—through the sky and the landscape—in the aviation age.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations are not reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources

Center, Art Department, Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, D.C.

Figure 1: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 1, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 2: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 2, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 3: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 3, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 4: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 4, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 5: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 5, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 6: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 6, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 7: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 7, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 8: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 8, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 9: Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents: Set XX, No. 9, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 10: Alfred Stieglitz, Winter on Fifth Avenue, 1893, photogravure (from Camera Work 12, October 1905, pl. 2)

Figure 11: Alfred Stieglitz, Spring Showers, 1900/1901, photogravure (from Camera Work 36, October 1911, pl. 16)

Figure 12: Alfred Stieglitz, In the New York Central Yards, 1903, photogravure (from Camera Work 20, October 1907, pl. 3)

Figure 13: Alfred Stieglitz, City of Ambition, 1910, photogravure (from Camera Work 36, October 1911, pl. 1)

Figure 14: Alfred Stieglitz, A Dirigible, 1910, photogravure (from Camera Work 36, October 11, pl. 8)

Figure 15: Alfred Stieglitz, The Aeroplane, 1910, photogravure (from Camera Work 36, October 11, pl. 7)

Figure 16: Alexander McAdie, Alto Cumuli, ca. late 1920s, in Alexander McAdie, Clouds (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1930), Plate XL, unpaginated.

Figure 17: Alexander McAdie, Fair Weather Cumuli, ca. late 1920s, in Alexander McAdie, Clouds (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1930), Plate XIII, unpaged.

Figure 18: Alto-Cumulus, late 1920s, in Whatham, Richard. Meteorology: For Aviator & Layman (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1930), 86.

Figure 19: Airplane Observation Flight, U.S. Weather Bureau

Figure 21: Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George, New York, 1920, gelatin silver print, Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Figure 22: Federal Aviation Administration Aerobatic Rules, APA Special Provision 2016.

Figure 23: Multi-Tiered Sky Ways, illustrated by Guy Charette. Elizabeth Cameron, How Things Work: Flight (Alexandria, Virginia: Time Life Books, 1990), 102.

Figure 25: Fedele Azari, Prospettive di Volo (Perspectives in Flight), 1926

Figure 26: Alfred Stieglitz, Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, No. 1, 1922, gelatin silver print, Photograph copyright Estate of Alfred Stieglitz / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Museum of Modern Art, New York

Figure 27: Alfred Stieglitz, Songs of the Sky, 1924, gelatin silver print, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Figure 28: Thomas Cole, View on Lake George, 1826, Purchased through a gift from Evelyn A. and William B. Jaffe, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

Figure 29: Martin Johnson Heade, Lake George, 1862, oil on canvas, Bequest of Maxim Karolik, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Figure 30: John Frederick Kensett, Lake George, 1870, oil on canvas, The Brooklyn Museum

Figure 31: Georgia O’Keeffe, A Celebration, 1924, oil on canvas, Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Seattle Art Museum, Washington

Figure 32: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jack in-the-Pulpit No. IV, 1930, oil on canvas Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 33: Arthur Dove, Sunrise, 1924, oil on wood, © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy of Terry Dintenfass, Inc., Milwaukee Art Museum, Michigan

Figure 34: Arthur Dove, Foghorns, 1929, oil on canvas, © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy of Terry Dintenfass, Inc., Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado

Figure 35: Alfred Stieglitz, The Net Mender, 1894, carbon print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 36: Edward Steichen, The Big White Cloud, Lake George, 1903, carbon print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection 1933, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Figure 37: Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George in Winter, 1926, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 38: Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George in Winter, 1926, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 39: Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George in Winter, 1926, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 40: Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George in Winter, 1926, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 41: Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George in Winter, 1926, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 42: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1892–1893, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

Figure 43: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1892–1893, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

Figure 44: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1892–1893, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

Figure 45: John Constable, Cloud Study, 1822, oil on paper, laid on board, Courtauld Gallery, London

Figure 46: John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

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“Carbon Printing Technique” http://www.nga.gov/research/online-editions/alfred-stieglitz-key- set/practices-and processes/carbon-print.html (accessed April 19, 2020.)