For midterms, I decided to explore the style of Alfred Stieglitz. After the presentation on pictorial photography, I was very inspired by the set of photographs that Stieglitz created with his second wife, Georgia O’Keeffe as the main subject. I was very inspired by how he shot a series of portraiture that showed parts of her body instead of just her face to portray emotions.

Prior to the series of photographs he made of O’keeffe, he already shot in a similar style where he would shoot his subject suggesting that they have an intimate relationship. They were similar in the sense that he was portraying intimacy. However, for photographs like  Sun’s Rays, Paula, Berlin, 1889 as shown below, he shot it in a way whereby you can clearly see who was the subject. He even took into account the setting of the  photograph which is in a room to portray the intimacy. As for the series of photographs of O’keeffe, he only shot parts of her body which were so expressive that you could tell that they had a “more then it meets the eye” relationship between them. It was not only through the nudes that there was a hint of intimacy between them, even the photographs of her hands, I could sense that there was something more between them.

Examples of portraiture of O’Keeffe:

From what I’ve read from research sources, it was mentioned that as their relationship thrived, Stieglitz continued to photograph her “with more heat and excitement”. In my opinion, I feel that this was because he got more comfortable with her and he was more into her that he was able to portray this emotion of his in his series of photographs of O’Keeffe. In 1919, he wrote to Sadakichi Hartmann that “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 find this sentence intriguing, it makes me wonder what he thinks of his works prior to this series. Were they not enough to make him feel like he was photographing? Does he think that they were gimmicky?

Another interesting point worth mentioning is that O’Keeffe wrote that Stieglitz idea’s of a portrait was not contained in one picture instead they were made up of several pictures “addressing an idea and personality too large to fit in a single photograph”. Therefore, using the same idea, I tried to follow his style and came up with the following photographs in hope to bring across one message throughout my series of photographs.