Norms Notes Number Two: Kirkstall Abbey and The Equivalent

Over a century ago, the renowned American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, defined four categories of photograph:

Documentary
Informational
Pictorial
The Equivalent

The equivalent, he wrote, was a feeling I have about something other than the subject of the photograph.

The following conversation gives a sense of the difficulty in conveying the concept:

Man:
Is this a photograph of water?
Stieglitz:
What difference does it make of what it is a photograph?
Man:
But is it a photograph of water?
Stieglitz:
I tell you it does not matter.
Man:
Well, then, is it a picture of the sky?
Stieglitz:
It happens to be a picture of the sky. But I cannot understand why that is of any importance.

Minor White wrote that an equivalent must evoke a very special emotion; some would say “life enhancing”.

New York Times art critic Andy Grundberg said The Equivalent "remains photography's most radical demonstration of faith in the existence of a reality behind and beyond that offered by the world of appearances. They are intended to function evocatively, like music, and they express a desire to leave behind the physical world, a desire symbolized by the virtual absence of horizon and scale clues within the frame. Emotion resides solely in form, they assert, not in the specifics of time and place”.

My own view is that Stieglitz was too rigid in his definitions as there is a proportion of The Equivalent in all the other three categories, which are in themselves not mutually exclusive.

However I have been trying to take some pictures which attempt to convey as high a proportion of The Equivalent as possible:

.

A recent trip, to the wonderful Kirkstall Abbey in Leeds, made me feel that images of crumbling religious buildings carry a higher proportion of The Equivalent than most subjects, as the photographs of Frederick Evans and Edwin Smith demonstrate.