How artists and photographers captured clouds, on show at the Met

The landscape is captured, but the sky is disappointing. Early photographers were not always failing to wait for the right clouds; sometimes their equipment could not record them adequately. They painted skies into images or combined negatives. A natural-looking sky did not necessarily come from a single exposure.

Chasing Clouds at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art follows the sky through painting and photography. It begins with outdoor oil sketches from the early nineteenth century, moves through photographic experiments, and reaches Alfred Stieglitz's 1920s cloud series Equivalents.

For painters, clouds tested the ability to capture rapidly changing nature. Photography promised a more immediate and detailed record, but the results did not immediately match that promise. Photographers intervened by hand to close the gap. Later advances in chemistry and optics changed how clouds could be recorded.

This history should not simply be equated with today's image compositing: the purposes and ways of presenting images differ. It does, however, encourage attention to the materials and methods behind a photographic sky, as well as the moment the shutter was released.

Chasing Clouds runs until February 28, 2027. Beyond admiring the clouds, visitors can consider how the sky was brought into the image. Judging old photographic handwork by today's capabilities overlooks the problems photographers faced then. These skies preserve both changing clouds and the technical limits encountered in trying to capture them.