Stieglitz Nebulae

A few years back I thought maybe I’d do something other than art, to use that time in some other creative endeavor, maybe one that had a clearer benefit to society, a more obvious purpose. I had almost talked myself into it, saying that I would let fate decide whether I kept at it or not. Then I sold a set of these photographs to a major art museum. I guess I’ll keep at it a little while longer.

Alfred Stieglitz made a couple of hundred images of clouds back in the early 1900s. That doesn’t seem like many images today when you can just hold the shutter button down and capture as many in a few seconds or just google “clouds” and have as many as you care to look at. But back in those days images were shot on film, big sheets of film, sometimes on glass plates, and they were printed one at time by the photographer—if you didn’t print them no one could see them!

His point—by not including anything in the picture that would really qualify as subject matter—was that photography could be special in the same way that art is special. That it wasn’t all just pictures of cats and kids and selfies on Instagram.

So I remade his photographs, downloading space pictures and removing all those thousands of pesky stars, showing the clouds in all of their glory, hoping that photographs—art—are still special.