No artist has been photographed from the beginning to the end of a career as frequently and consistently as Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986). She was first photographed in 1917 by world-famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) when she traveled to New York to see the solo show of her work he organized that year. Stieglitz continued photographing O’Keeffe from 1918, when she moved to New York, until 1937, when he put his camera down, and in this period made more than 350 photographs of her.

Before Stieglitz’s death, Ansel Adams and Arnold Newman had made O’Keeffe a subject in their work, and she was subsequently photographed by these other important American photographers until the end of her life. Because many of these images have been and continue to be reproduced in newspapers and popular magazines, O’Keeffe at any age is easily recognized by the public.
Long before photographing O’Keeffe, Stieglitz wanted to create a specific portrait type. As O’Keeffe put it: “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.”¹ He had initiated his experiment after the 1898 birth of his daughter, Katherine, but his first wife, Emmeline stopped the project, claiming that he “was spoiling the child’s fun and making her self-conscious.”² Stieglitz never realized his concept completely, but the composite portrait of O’Keeffe made between 1917 and 1937 is one of the most celebrated achievements of his career.

O’Keeffe understood what Stieglitz wanted to accomplish, and she was committed to helping him realize his conception. The degree of her complicity in the creation of Stieglitz’s composite portrait has long been a subject of debate.  Was she a highly active participant to the point that the composite portrait was a collaborative effort or was Stieglitz in total control of his model, posing her precisely as he wanted to meet his objectives?

Neither O’Keeffe nor Stieglitz wrote or spoke directly about this issue, but O’Keeffe mentioned the difficulty of holding poses for Stieglitz in her introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition of this portrait at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1978). She stated: “For those slower glass negatives I would have to be still for three or four minutes. That is hard—you blink when you shouldn’t—your mouth twitches—your ear itches or some other spot itches. Your arms and hands get tired, and you can’t stay still. I was often spoiling a photograph because I couldn’t help moving—and a great deal of fuss was made about it.”³

Despite O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s silence on this issue, another of his models of the 1910s and 1920s was not—his niece and O’Keeffe’s close friend Georgia Engelhard Cromwell. Engelhard stated: “Frankly my recollections of posing for Alfred were a minor version of hell. . . . He was terribly intense and exacting—and everything about the pose had to be just so down to the position of your thumbnail. . . . There was no conversation except rather barked commands to do this or that with your hands, your head . . . and he could get quite upset and a bit gruff if you didn’t instantly comply.”⁴  And in 1977 she wrote: “He portrayed the sitter as he saw him, not as the sitter wished to appear.”⁵

Stieglitz’s photographs of O’Keeffe through the early 1920s—especially those presenting her in the nude or partially clothed and often positioned before one of her recently completed and innovative abstract works—present her as a highly sensual, seemingly naive, vulnerable force of nature. Stieglitz’s exhibition of many of these images in 1921 created a sensation in New York because they were startlingly sharply focused, “straight photographs” of the nude female form that confirmed the then-scandalous love affair between the thirty-four-year-old O’Keeffe and the fifty-seven-year-old, married guru of the New York art community. Moreover, these photographs forged a public image of O’Keeffe as a sexually liberated, modern woman, which functioned as a visual equivalent for Stieglitz’s compelling promotion of O’Keeffe’s art as a manifestation of her sexuality.

O’Keeffe objected from the beginning to anyone describing her as anything but a serious, hard-working, thoughtful artist, as well as to the sexualized interpretations of her art that dominated the criticism, especially those generated by the retrospective exhibition of her work that Stieglitz organized in 1923. Although she realized that the critics had taken their cue from Stieglitz, she could not challenge one of the New York art community’s most prominent art authorities. Moreover, his support was responsible for her burgeoning career and thus her increasing financial independence. Also, having lived with Stieglitz since 1918, O’Keeffe knew well enough that neither she nor anyone else could change his opinion.

Yet O’Keeffe effected various silent strategies to counter what she considered misconceptions of herself and her work, such as shifting the emphasis in her imagery away from abstraction. She felt that her decidedly innovative abstract works, whose sources were indeterminate, had been responsible for generating Freudian interpretations. Although abstraction would remain the basis of her subsequent work, by the end of the 1920s, she had successfully identified herself as a painter of recognizable forms by which she remains best known today.

Her success in moving critics away from Freudian interpretations of her work was limited, but she achieved great success in forging a new public image.  From the mid-1920s, she appears increasingly in Stieglitz’s photographs as a self-assured, independent: anything but the vulnerable, sexual creature of his early portraits, suggesting that she had either come to play a more assertive role in Stieglitz’s composite portrait or had gained and projected the kind of self-confidence that these later photographs assert. Certainly, she demonstrated another degree of assertiveness in the 1930s by publicly denouncing Freudian interpretations of it.

Whatever the case, it seems that O’Keeffe had learned how photography could assist in the art of establishing a public identity. This is especially evident after her move to New Mexico in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death, when she began allowing herself to be photographed by numerous professional photographers. Having learned the art of promotion through photography from a master, she increasingly turned to the medium to establish her public image as a hard-working, no-nonsense pioneer and individualist whose commitment to her work had allowed her to realize the American dream of self-fulfillment. Her success is best measured by the fact that the public image she created effectively replaced the one presented in Stieglitz’s early portraits of her.

1

See Georgia O’Keeffe, Introduction, in Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Viking Press, 1978), n.p.

2

See Nancy Newhall, From Adams to Stieglitz: Pioneers of Modern Photography (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1989), p. 128.

3

4. O’Keeffe, O’Keeffe: A Portrait, n.p.

4

Georgia Englehard Cromwell to William Iness Homer, December 15, 1970s, in William Iness Homer Archive, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

5

Ibid.