Throughout his career, Stieglitz fought to establish photography as a fine art medium. A champion of the visual arts, his own work gradually transformed from the pictorialism espoused by his Photo-Secession group to the purist sensibility reflected in the work of photographers such as Paul Strand, whose photographs Stieglitz exhibited and published. Stieglitz’s "Equivalent" series was initiated in the early 1920s at his family home in upstate New York. Using photographs to convey a spiritual realm, he presented ethereal cloud formations as approximations of his states of consciousness. This striking photograph was made the year before his marriage to painter Georgia O’Keeffe, a productive and inspired time for both artists.