I suspect Stieglitz chose 'Equivalent' over 'Evocation' or any other option precisely because it sounds less vague and woolly.
My evidence is only anecdotal, but my grandfather, who was born in 1902 and in the 1920s was starting life as a physics and maths teacher, always emphasised 'equivalence' as a mathematical concept. This was a time when a great deal of 'airy-fairy' pure mathematics invented in the late C19th turned out to have applications in the new fields of quantum mechanics and relativity. The idea that disparate branches of knowledge were linked by a formal equivalence was explicitly stressed in secondary and higher education - in Britain, at least.
I've been grieving over the death of the author, and have decided that said death was but wishful thinking. If art were delivered through a wormhole or portal – as some art of the ancient past – then authorial intent is erased, but anything else is made and experienced as part of a society, and an economy. Photography is not experienced as images flashed onto our retinas at random, but comes with literal and metaphorical frames. Reviews, galleries, interviews, 'likes', and even discussions on LF.info, all contribute to our understanding and enjoyment of a given work. If we are not sure why a photograph looks the way it does, the natural tendency is not to throw up our hands and bemoan the impossibility of even imperfect communication, it is to go and ask the photographer what the hell they thought they were up to.
I do like serendipidity. I love landscapes, but I often draw most inspiration from painters and photographers who are not best known for their landscapes. Several times I have been to blockbuster shows at major art museums, only to find that my favourite work is not available in any other form, online or offline – often it's not even in the catalogue. So I appreciate the value of the viewer's privileged position, and am at least partially immune to crowd sourcing my own aesthetic judgements, but I am still approaching those works via the sacralising environment of an art exhibition, with the full weight of canonising authority there to back up my supposedly independent taste.
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