Photograph by: Alfred Stieglitz Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
When Georgia O’Keeffe received the first set of portraits of her made by Alfred Stieglitz in 1917, she was in awe. The very idea that an evocative portrait could be made of a person without showing their face was unheard of, at the time. “In my excitement at such pictures of myself I took them to school and held them up for my class to see,” she recollected. “They were surprised and astonished too. Nothing like that had come into our world before.” It was Stieglitz’s belief that, to grasp the essence of a person, within a frame, a photographer has to look beyond making portraits that draw attention solely to the face. According to him, it would take several images depicting one’s movements and expressions to capture a grain of truth about them. “To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person,” he declared, “is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.”
The two had first met in 1916, at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery. Twenty-four years his junior, the renowned photographer was quite taken by O’Keeffe who, at the time, was gaining recognition as a painter. Soon after, they began a regular correspondence, and he even included her drawings in a group show at his gallery.
Up until then, Stieglitz’s focus on the 291 Art Gallery and the journal, Camera Works, had left his photographic work a little neglected. In this regard, O’Keeffe had quite an impact on him. In a letter to Sadakichi Hartmann, an art and photography critic, in 1919, he wrote, “I am at last photographing again… It is straight. No tricks of any kind—No humbug—No sentimentalism—Not old nor new—It is so sharp that you can see the (pores) in a face—and yet it is abstract… It is a series of about 100 pictures of one person—heads and ears—toes—hands—torsos—It is the doing of something I had in mind for very many years.”
When he first made pictures of O’Keeffe in 1917, she donned a “crisp black dress with a sheer, voile shawl collar, reminiscent of the one she wore when they first met at his gallery.” Early on, Stieglitz had observed her expressive manner of communication, and how she often used her hands while emphasising. Hands of Georgia O’Keeffe at 291 is an elegant tribute to a woman who captivated him. In a letter to a friend he said, “She (Georgia O’Keeffe) is much more extraordinary than even I had believed—In fact I don’t believe there has ever been anything like her—Mind and feeling very clear—spontaneous—and uncannily beautiful—absolutely living every pulse beat.”
This article originally appeared in the November 2020 issue of Better Photography.