Georgia O’Keeffe Was an Attained Photographer, Too. A New Demonstrate Focuses on Her Function in the Medium for the 1st Time

Ga O’Keeffe was surrounded by photography for most of her existence, and still her possess initiatives in the medium have mostly long gone unstudied.

But now, the Museum of Good Arts, Houston (MFAH) is debuting “Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer,” the initial exhibition devoted to the revolutionary modernist’s photographic get the job done. Virtually 100 pictures make up the exhibit, most black and white and all culled from a a short while ago rediscovered archive.

While she was a informal digital camera lover in her early a long time, O’Keeffe’s relationship to photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in 1924 located her immersed in the medium like never ever ahead of. She posed in hundreds of Stieglitz’s portraits, helped make and mount his prints, and even assisted in the design of his shows.

But it was not right until the mid-1940s, soon after the death of her partner, that O’Keeffe commenced critically generating photos of her very own. Learning with photographer Todd Webb, she found herself turning a lens towards her environment in northern New Mexico—often capturing chemically the similar topics she painted years before.

It’s not really hard to notify that O’Keeffe was the eye guiding the images—and not just simply because the majority of them characteristic the very same beloved New Mexican landscapes and flora that populate her paintings. Her signature feeling of composition is there, far too. You can figure out it in the way she photographs the bodily curves of riverbeds and adobe households, or in her fascination with the prolonged, graphic shadows that dramatize the desert each individual morning and afternoon. Her capacity to seize nature’s female grace stays unparalleled.

Right after the show’s operate in Texas, it will head to the Addison Gallery of American Artwork in Andover, Massachusetts. There, when the exhibition opens in February of next year, it will do so together with two other displays meant to contextualize O’Keeffe’s pictures: “Arthur Wesley Dow: Nearest to the Divine,” which provides jointly the operate of O’Keeffe’s influential mentor in New York and “’What Subsequent?’: Digicam Function and 291 Journal,” a collection of visuals from two seminal pictures journals compiled to offer a snapshot of the creative scene encompassing her and Stieglitz.

See a lot more examples of O’Keeffe’s photography below.

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