
Alfred Stieglitz photographing Georgia O’Keeffe, 1924 / Arnold H. Rönnebeck, photographer. Arnold Rönnebeck and Louise Emerson Ronnebeck papers, 1884-2002. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
In her old age, Georgia O’Keeffe described photography sessions with Alfred Stieglitz as work. This rare photo of such a session in progress, one of several that sculptor Arnold H. Rönnebeck took in 1924 at Lake George, pulls back the curtain on the romance with which the world views Stieglitz’s portrait project of O’Keeffe.
What interests me is O’Keeffe’s talent for posing. Even back in Texas, snapshots show her mugging to the camera. She was acutely aware of being-looked-at (while claiming to hate being looked at). What I wonder is, how did that awareness inform her painterly empathy for the objects she painted. Like the flowers. Those showy flowers. Somehow, it seems to me, they benefit from O’Keeffe’s years of posing for Stieglitz.
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