The turned-away Norman also testifies to Stieglitz’s desire for photographs to embrace spiritual magic and capture medium-busting meta-meanings. Again, the idea of an “equivalent,” the photograph as a vessel bearing “ur-visual” information — Hoffman’s text, with numerous references to writers both contemporary with Stieglitz and later, proves immensely informative in this area of the man’s innovative art practice. “Equivalent” was a term Stieglitz began to use for his photographs around 1927. He used it, Hoffman points out, to refer to natural subject matter that had assumed spiritual significance for the aging artist.

Stieglitz had earlier thought about his sky photographs in musical terms. The back cover photograph from 1921 shows Lake George as a ragged mottling across the lower third of the dark image field, while a cloudy occlusion commands the photograph’s upper half. This is another surprising image to choose as representative; ten years later Stieglitz was making monumentally memorable images of the sky that freed themselves from earthbound, rationalizing horizons and, in all likelihood, secured his place in the pantheon of photographic history. In “Songs of the Sky,” his goal was to create music, music such that a composer might see them and identify them as expressions of his own tonal medium. This desire is well documented, and Hoffman incorporates the evolution of this passion in persuasive fashion.

If she ennobles the man, she does it in a broad context. Her reading of Stieglitz’s ecosystem is inclusive, diligent, and respectful…

Throughout Alfred Stieglitz: A Legacy of Light, Hoffman does us this service. If she ennobles the man, she does it in a broad context. Her reading of Stieglitz’s ecosystem is inclusive, diligent, and respectful; there are references and cross-references, tangents followed from one first-person commentator to another in remarkable ways. Following the Equivalents, again, we find not only the historically familiar and perhaps all-too-obvious 1923 essay by Stieglitz entitled “How I Came to Photograph Clouds,” which lays out his sense of connection to writer Waldo Frank and composer Ernst Bloch, but also draws in relative correspondence between Bloch and photographer Paul Strand, and later writings uniting all the strands.

Just as Hoffman chose less iconic cover images to represent Stieglitz (thereby inducing us to look closer to ascertain her mission, if it is not to celebrate his high points as many have done before), she takes time and discursive space to lay out her argument and supporting evidence. Admirably, she allows Stieglitz’s brilliance to diffuse itself somewhat while simultaneously enhancing our admiration for Stieglitz’s reach. He was, after all, born in Hoboken, grew famous across the river in New York City, and didn’t care much for travel. Besides, she writes, “for Stieglitz, cars also represented an aspect of American commercialism against which he was continually fighting” (p. 200). What successful person today would reject automobiles, or the success they represent? The world, or at least a section of it, seems drawn to and revolved around Stieglitz, despite, or perhaps because of, his unorthodox attitudes toward business.

Hoffman adds a unique touch to this exploration of Stieglitz’s legacy — her own photographs of the Lake George environs, including a view from the waterside where Stieglitz’s ashes were strewn. Her commitment to the project is not only academic, it is personal, and includes notions of homage and pilgrimage. This is a commendable, multi-dimensional revisitation of a well-explored life, and a volume that offers to both newcomers and those familiar with the interwoven narratives of Alfred, Georgia, Dorothy, and the twentieth-century modernists a fresh ennoblement.