The Story Behind The Picture- A Striking Portrait Of Intimacy

When Georgia O’Keeffe received the first set of portraits of her made by Alfred Stieglitz in 1917, she was in awe.

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The very idea that an evocative portrait could be made of a person without showing their face was unheard of, at the time. “In my excitement at such pictures of myself I took them to school and held them up for my class to see,” she recollected. “They were surprised and astonished too. Nothing like that had come into our world before.” It was Stieglitz’s belief that to grasp the essence of a person, within a frame, a photographer has to look beyond making portraits that draw attention solely to the face. According to him, it would take several images depicting one’s movements and expressions to capture a grain of truth about them. “To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person,” he declared, “is as futile as to demand