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Overview
The American artist Georgia O'Keeffe had been living alone on the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico for seventeen years when photographer John Loengard, on assignment for Life magazine, visited her there in 1966. Even in that vast, windswept landscape, O'Keeffe's was an imposing presence. Adamant about her privacy and about the parts of her life she consented to have photographed, O'Keeffe, then eighty years old, proved a challenging but rewarding subject. Striking in their simplicity and bold composition, the fifty photographs in this classic volume - arranged in sequence from sunrise to sunset - record a day in the life not of a renowned painter, but of a woman living alone in a lonely setting. Yet the pictures offer a clear connection between the austere poetry of the landscape and O'Keeffe's own self-created outer and inner worlds, her artistic imagination being filtered by the bleached bones and infinite emptiness of the desert, which, as she said herself, "knows no kindness with all its beauty". Accompanied by some of O'Keeffe's reflections on life in the desert, and by the photographer's illuminating recollections of the three-day shoot, this volume, reprinted in an attractive format, is a stunning example of the important dynamic that exists between photographer and subject, and remains one of the most stirring photographic essays ever created of an American artist.In this unique book, Loengard has chosen 47 of the finest photographs he took of the grand, solitary woman of the desert, and has arranged then in a sequence that records the course of a day in the life of Georgia O'Keefe from, sunrise to sunset.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
A renowned charcoal and watercolor artist, and, after 1946, the widow of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) lived and worked reclusively in a remote desert area of New Mexico for nearly 40 years before her death. Here in 1966, as a young Life magazine photographer, Loengard spent three days with O'Keeffe, photographing with grace and simplicity her chosen environment-a collection of rattles from snakes she had killed with a walking stick, the bleached cattle skulls seen in some of her paintings, the artist herself gardening resolutely in a hardscrabble plot or taking long walks over a brooding desert expanse at twilight. A re-editing of the original Life photo-essay in this slim but richly produced volume attests glowingly to O'Keeffe's enduring prestige, Loengard's status as a camera artist and the cultural eminence of photography itself. (Apr.)Book Details
Published
April 1, 1995
Publisher
Stewart, Tabori and Chang
Pages
79
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781556704239