Alfred Stieglitz
American
Georgia O'Keeffe, 1919
Palladium print
From the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.745
Alfred Stieglitz worked tirelessly to promote photography as an equal to painting and sculpture. Georgia O'Keeffe was just gaining acclaim as a painter when Stieglitz first photographed her in front of her watercolors in 1917. Although Stieglitz was 23 years her senior, the two began a passionate affair; they married in 1924. O'Keeffe reinvigorated Stieglitz, who, as she wrote, began photographing her with "a kind of heat and excitement," ultimately producing over 300 studies of her clothed or naked body. Many of these compositions isolated body parts as expressive ele-ments; they also were frequently produced in series.
O'Keeffe wrote that Stieglitz's "idea of a portrait was not just one picture"; instead, it was a composite of pictures addressing an idea too large to fit in a single photograph. Stieglitz used the rich brown tones and lustrous highlights possible in palladium printing to heighten the sensuousness of his imagery.
