Seeing Georgia

Looking at the work of Alfred Stieglitz, I was most struck by the series of photographs he made of his wife, American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. What began as a correspondence blossomed into a passionate love affair, and the artist, 24 years Stieglitz's junior, revitalized his passion for his own art. Over the next twenty years he made over three hundred portraits of her—nude and clothed, showing her entire body as well as isolated views of her neck, hands, breasts, and feet. In 1919, he wrote to Sadakichi Hartmann: “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—& yet it is abstract. . . . It is a series of about 100 pictures of one person—heads & ears—toes—hands—torsos—It is the doing of something I had in mind for very many years.” I met Lana Limon shortly before the pandemic began, and for the past two years we've formed a close bond. She bears a striking resemblance to Georgia, and more than that is an artist in her own right. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to pay homage to that great series, and in doing so try to capture what he might have felt as he was creating each image. As it's still a work in progress, and might be for some time, I'm only including a few individual images rather than a series.