Foundation Skills Course – Week 7 Learning from the greats

This week we continued our exploration of Abstract Photography by looking at two great photographers who share a connection: Alfred Stieglitz and Minor White. Both men were inspirational leaders, turning photography into an art form.

Stieglitz was probably responsible for the birth of abstract photography through his creation of cloud photographs he called, ‘Equivalents’. For over 10 years from 1922 Stieglitz photographed clouds with the intention that they conveyed emotion. This was very much in vogue at the time in art – the idea that colour, shape and line could convey an emotional context.

Minor White, who for a while worked with Stieglitz, was very taken with the idea of Equivalents. He used it as a basis to develop his personal explorations of how scenes in nature could resonate with the photographer and enable them to create photos of how they felt at the time. He believed that these photos had no requirement to conform to known ideas of visual design, such as red for danger.

After a discussion about these ideas the students were invited to go out into nature and create their own equivalents. Here they are.