Songs of the Sky

Companion sequence to the Equivalents proper, the Songs of the Sky photographs were made by Stieglitz from his porch at Lake George, New York, between 1922 and 1929, on a Graflex 4 × 5 view camera using only the available light. Stieglitz titled the series after lieder — German art song — to make explicit the analogy he was pursuing between photography and music; he would write in 1923 that he wanted 'to put down the equivalent of what I see and feel through music… these photographs are notations of the sky as I felt it.' Where the strict Equivalents (1925-1934) excluded horizon lines and any terrestrial reference, the Songs of the Sky often retain a treeline or rooftop fragment, marking the series as the transitional bridge between the 1922-1923 Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs and the fully abstract Equivalents — a sequence the critic Rosalind Krauss would later analyse as the founding gesture of what she called photography's 'rhetorical operations.' The Metropolitan Museum of Art (DP232915) holds this print within the Alfred Stieglitz Collection donated by the photographer himself in 1933 — the foundational gift of 419 prints that anchored the MET as a primary repository for Stieglitz's authorised editions, alongside the National Gallery of Art's Key Set of 1,642 prints donated by O'Keeffe between 1949 and 1980. At Maison Picturale today, the gelatin silver idiom translates most faithfully into a platine-palladium tirage on 640 gsm cotton paper: the noble-metal procédé delivers the long, breathing mid-tone scale the sky demands, without silver-halide toxicity, in Vision Picturale's reformulated non-toxic chemistry signed by master printers in Paris.

Reference file : MET Open Access via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)