Spiritual America

Photographed in 1923 at Stieglitz's family estate at Lake George, New York, Spiritual America is a tight gelatin silver crop of the rear flank of a gelded workhorse cinched into harness — the harness buckle and the absence of the testicles legible in the same compressed frame. The title is Stieglitz's most biting allegory of American materialism: the spiritual castrated and harnessed to industrial servitude, issued the year after T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land and three years before Sinclair Lewis won the Pulitzer for Arrowsmith — Stieglitz operating in the same critical register as the literary modernists who diagnosed post-war American materialism. The image was published in MSS, Stieglitz's short-lived 1922-23 journal, and reproduced in the 1924 catalogue of his exhibition at the Anderson Galleries — the show that introduced the Equivalents to the New York public. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (DP232981) holds the print within the Alfred Stieglitz Collection donated in 1933 by the photographer himself, the foundational gift of 419 prints. Walker Evans, Paul Strand and the next generation of American modernist photographers cited the image as the moment photographic metaphor — not pictorialist allegory — entered American art. At Maison Picturale today, this gelatin silver idiom transposes most faithfully into a platine-palladium tirage on 640 gsm cotton paper: the noble-metal procédé delivers the long tonal scale Stieglitz required for the wet sheen of the horse's flank and the deep buckle shadow, without silver-halide toxicity. A charbon (carbon transfer) alternative in Vision Picturale's reformulated non-toxic chemistry would emphasise the muscular weight and the matte, deposit-rich surface — the transverse USP of the Maison Picturale atelier.

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