Virtuoso with a camera

PERHAPS the first thing that strikes one about the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz in this Sydney exhibition is his profound understanding of tonal value.

PERHAPS the first thing that strikes one about the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) in the Sydney exhibition of work from his later years is his profound understanding of tonal value, fundamental in all pictures, but quintessential in black-and-white photography.

The word tone, in all its meanings, is akin to tension, and both derive from the Greek verb to stretch, teino.

Tone in music changes with the tension of the string; tone in muscles is a matter of tension too, of the correct point between cramping and slackness.

Tone in art is the relation between lights and darks in a composition. It is what gives shape to masses and makes the picture read, from a distance, as either a clear pattern or a confusion of small forms.

But it is also what imparts distinctness and strength to the image or alternatively moodiness and subtlety.

A wide tonal range, with strong contrasts between lights and darks, produces pictorial tension and dramatic effect; a narrow range, with a more attenuated contrast of light and dark, results in lower tension and a more elusive sentiment.

The principle is also used to suggest depth in painting through what is called aerial perspective: foregrounds are tonally more contrasted than backgrounds, which become more muted with distance and the depth of atmosphere.

Stieglitz employs the diminishing tone of aerial perspective in City of Ambition (1910), one of his many images of New York. The foreground water sparkles with bright lights and darks, the middle-ground buildings form a deep shadowy mass, and the background buildings are a soft grey. The highest lights are in reality the plumes of white smoke, but the contrast is reduced because they are profiled against weaker darks.

In a more expressive vein, From the Back Window, 291 (1915) evokes a vivid sense of the nocturnal city through the contrast of a lit doorway and window in the dark of the night; but there is actually less tonal contrast in this image than in From My Window at the Shelton (1931). The later picture does not have such a bright light, although it is a daytime or afternoon scene, but it does have much deeper blacks; and that is why it is imbued with greater drama or even menace while From the Back Window, with its much softer darkness, has mystery.

What these examples show is not only that Stieglitz was a virtuoso, but also that his aesthetic aims were completely different from those of the documentary photographers recently discussed in this column.

Stieglitz was less concerned with capturing aspects of contemporary social life and more interested in the potential of photography, as its name suggests, to paint with light.

The city was one of his subjects, the human figure another, and nature an increasingly important concern in the years of his maturity covered by the exhibition, when he spent months of every year at his country property at Lake George in the north of New York state.

During the previous two decades, Stieglitz had been largely occupied running a gallery, 291 (1905-1917), devoted to photography and contemporary art, publishing his journal Camera Work (1903-17), and energetically promoting the idea that photography should be taken seriously as fine art. It was only at Lake George that he eventually built a proper darkroom.

For all the simplicity of his equipment, Stieglitz took the utmost care with every stage of his photographic work, from the exposing of the negative to its developing and printing, in which he used different processes and photographic papers to obtain particular nuances.

Time and again, looking at these pictures of trees, skies or buildings on the estate, one is struck by the photographer's extraordinary acuity of vision and searching appetite for truth; and at the same time by the paradox that what he reveals to us is the work not only of careful selection and framing, but of filters and more arcane processes in the printing itself. The truth that Stieglitz captures is one that cannot actually be seen with the naked eye, but only discovered through the artifice of the camera.

No pictures in the exhibition illustrate this principle better than the remarkable series of cloud pictures, starting with a sequence made in 1922. Without dark glasses, clouds can disappear into glare; without orange and red filters, the camera may see nothing but overexposed emptiness.

The cloud series was undertaken after a critic suggested that his success as a photographer had something to do with his force of personality and ability to hypnotise his sitters; he wanted to show that he could make great pictures out of material that was beyond his influence, although the reasoning is a little shaky, since the images are in fact the result of considerable manipulation.

Nonetheless, Stieglitz produced a remarkable set of 10 cloudscapes which he thought of as a kind of music. Oddly enough, the comparison is more plausible than the similar claims of abstract painting, precisely because pictures of clouds are not abstract; however vague and elusive they may be, they retain a reference to something in the world whose physical properties we all know.

The cloudscapes are very effective as metaphors for music. The eminently fluid, watery and airy substance of clouds is in constant movement: gathering to dispersing, density to rarefaction, tension to serenity.

These are much the kind of sensations one may have listening to the unfolding of an orchestral composition, perhaps especially if one is more naturally attuned to the visual and the tactile than to the mysterious geometries of music.

Most works in the exhibition correspond to the period of his relationship with Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), which began in 1917 when she was a young painter of around 30. Stieglitz was almost 25 years her senior.

O'Keeffe was evidently brilliant and enormously attractive, although not conventionally beautiful. She and Stieglitz had an extremely intense relationship for the first few years, but grew less close in the late 20s, and in the last years of his life she spent much of her time in New Mexico, painting the works for which she is known, strange vulval flowers alternating with bones, skulls and desert imagery: sex and death.

Stieglitz's fascination with O'Keeffe produced one of the most memorable parts of his oeuvre, an extended sequence of photographic portrait studies made over 20 years and amounting to some 300 pictures.

The reason for this proliferation of images is partly the lover's fascination, but the common anxiety that no one image can be definitive is taken to radical and unprecedented lengths by Stieglitz, who not only represents her naked and clothed -- in buttoned-up overcoat, open shirt or borrowed hat -- but who also photographs her in parts. Thus there are studies of the hands, face and torso in different permutations: the head with arms; the head with arms and one of her drawings in the background. There are endless variations in the degrees of intimacy, of revelation, of poise and of reserve from one picture to the next.

But there is more than this: there is the sense that Georgia cannot be represented in a single image; that she is fundamentally complex, variable and irreducible to synthesis. One senses this even in her origins. Her parents were dairy farmers in Wisconsin, but her maternal grandfather was a Hungarian aristocrat.

The multiple fragmentary portraits represent the different and contradictory aspects of the young woman: her hands are aristocratic and expressive, her feet ungainly; her body is beautiful, feminine and sensual, but her face can look quite masculine; and she seems neither young nor old, or inexplicably now one and now the other.

This discovery of fragmentary identity, although arising from the intense experience of the relationship (then marriage) with O'Keeffe, is extended to other subjects, or rather to other women, for the mystery of ineffable identity does not apply in the same way to his portraits of men.

Such an approach to the representation of women can be seen, for example, in his way of giving a study of hands the subject's name as a title, as though it were a complete portrait; or of calling an incomplete image a portrait, as in the case of Portrait of R (1923), in reality the naked torso of a young woman floating in the water.

This picture, incidentally, shows how very difficult it is to reproduce the subtlety of Stieglitz's photographs with absolute fidelity, a difficulty he constantly encountered in the course of his career as a publisher.

In the exhibition catalogue, the general standard of reproduction is excellent, and the images and writing are a credit to Judy Annear, who curated the show. But if we compare the catalogue and the original, we can see that the designers could not resist the temptation to make the picture a little more legible than the original. The technology for making images clearer and sharper today is pervasive, and has produced its own problems: digitally-processed reproductions of works of art can be too good to be true. In this case, the sparkle on the water is a bit too crisp, the outlines of the hand against the breast too defined. Stieglitz was a master of tone, but that mastery often involved deliberately subduing the contrast, or loosening the tension between lights and darks.

In an early picture of New York in a snowstorm, Winter, Fifth Avenue (1905), he worked hard to attenuate the tonal contrast in order to achieve an effect of atmospheric unity that conveyed the experience of the snowstorm. He could of course also heighten the contrast when required, as in his composition of O'Keeffe's hands on a horse's skull, where the flesh appears to be darkened with a blue or green filter.

In many of the pictures of O'Keeffe, Stieglitz limits the range of tonal contrast, suggesting intimacy and subjectivity rather than the lucidity of objective vision. Sometimes the viewer has to adjust his eye to the suggestive and nuanced world evoked, so different from the loudness and explicitness of most photographic images we see today.

In the case of Portrait of R, the slightly heightened resolution still makes a beautiful picture, but the original is more poignant as well as more subtly integrated. The less distinct tones seem to reveal the artifice of the picture-making more candidly: we can see how the image is literally an imprint of light and shadow, and we sense the presence of the woman, the beauty and life of her body in the sunlight of summer on the lake, a fragile reality that has long vanished.

Stieglitz said that he wanted his photographs to look like photographs, which is a recognition that beauty in any artform can only arise from an acknowledgement of the media in which it is realised. Good painting strikes the viewer both as a sensitive representation of something and simultaneously as an object beautifully made in paint. Stieglitz's example reminds us, correspondingly, that memorable art comes from deep mastery of technique and indefatigable care in the handling of materials.