Alfred Stieglitz spent his career arguing that a photograph could be as much an art object as a painting, and this film traces how he won that argument. Archival prints move from his early pictorial studies of New York streets and snow-covered horses to the stark, abstract cloud studies he called Equivalents late in life. The film follows his parallel career as publisher of Camera Work and owner of the 291 gallery, where he showed Picasso, Matisse, and Rodin to American audiences years before most museums would touch them. His three-decade relationship with painter Georgia O'Keeffe runs through the film as both subject and structure, told through his photographs of her and letters between them. Critics, curators, and photography historians place his prints in context and explain why dealers and museums still treat his eye as the one that turned photography from a mechanical process into a medium with its own aesthetic standards.