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Matinee: 'Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer'
23 October 2021
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 419th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer.
In this 31:03 video, Lisa Volpe, associate curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents an overview of the first-ever exhibition of Georgia O'Keeffe's photographs.
The exhibition, which runs through Jan. 17,2022, contains over 90 of her 400 photographs with more than a dozen comparative paintings and drawings. It takes four rooms to lay out her approach to photography.
O'Keeffe, whose paintings are well known, was married to Alfred Stieglitz and rubbed elbows with Ansel Adams, among many other photographers.
The O'Keeffe family owned a Kodak Brownie, introduced when Georgia was three, and took family snapshots "from a very early date," Volpe says.
Volpe continues the story with the budding relationship between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz. Through Stieglitz she met many photographers including Paul Strand and Todd Webb. She assisted Stieglitz both at his gallery and with his photography. And even served as his model.
After his death in 1946, she moved to New Mexico where she developed her own photographic practice.
In 1955 she began her photographic practice when Todd Webb visited. Webb was walking across the country and, exhausted, spent more than two weeks with her. She used his camera to photograph him.
He would return in the summers, sharing his camera and talking photography. "She'll do well," Webb predicted.
O'Keeffe bought a Leica but never quite mastered it. But she did process her own film and made her own prints.
Volpe continues the story with her own encounter with O'Keeffe's photographs. At first, flipping through the binders of prints, she wondered if this was a doable project.
Then she came across an image that convinced her could be done. It took five years but the exhibit in Houston is the result.
You can leave the virtual lecture at the 20-minute mark (as Volpe says, "I'll never know") but she goes on to explain how she determined the photos were, in fact, made by O'Keeffe.
It may be the more fascinating part of the presentation, involving a lot of dogged detective work. And we don't use the word "dogged" lightly.
Volpe says the photographs, with O'Keeffe's constant reframing of familiar scenes, give you the feeling of seeing through her eyes. You appreciate what she loved about the land she lived in and how that, in the end, informed her painting.