Georgia O'Keeffe

Alfred Stieglitz

1918 · Palladium print · Photographs

"Stieglitz photographed me first at his gallery "291" in the spring of 1917. … My hands had always been admired since I was a little girl—but I never thought much about it. He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow—in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways—also my head—and I had to turn this way and that. … Stieglitz had a very sharp eye for what he wanted to say with the camera. When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. … His idea of a portrait was not just one picture. His dream was to start with a child at birth and photograph that child in all of its activities as it grew to be a person and on throughout its adult life. As a portrait it would be a photographic diary." Georgia O'Keeffe, 1978

Artist

Alfred Stieglitz

Date

1918

Medium

Palladium print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of Georgia O'Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997