Chasing Clouds

Early photographers could record a landscape yet struggle to capture the sky above it. Chasing Clouds at The Metropolitan Museum of Art follows the ways artists worked around this problem, from painting skies into photographs to combining separate negatives.

The exhibition begins with nineteenth-century oil sketches, made as painters studied changing weather outdoors and meteorologists developed systems for classifying clouds. Later photographic advances brought the sky within reach of the camera. The presentation ends with Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents from the 1920s, in which cloud formations become images capable of carrying feeling as well as recording nature.