Research: Alfred Stieglitz

 Research: Alfred Stieglitz 

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>>Georgia O'Keeffe (Hands), is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1919. It is part of a large group of more than 300 photographs that he took of the well-known painter; Georgia O'Keeffe, from 1917 prior to their 1924 marriage, through 1937.

>> Stieglitz believed that portraiture concerned more than the face and that it should be a record of a person's entire experience… “a mosaic of expressive movements, emotions, and gestures that would function collectively to evoke a life”. 

>>Hands is one of the images that Stieglitz made during his first portrait session with O’Keeffe, in 1917, when she traveled by train to New York to see her second show of drawings and watercolors. “A few weeks after I returned to Texas, photographs of me came,” she recalled. “In my excitement at such pictures of myself, I took them to school and held them up for my class to see. They were surprised and astonished too. Nothing like that had come into our world before.” The notion that an expressive portrait might be made without including the sitter’s face was indeed novel.

Note:

Although I love Alfred's approach to showing the beauty of his beloved's hands, I wouldn’t want to copy such a beautiful piece. In order to make it my own, I want to show the difference in shadows, textures, colors, etc. Between different people's hands. Amongst doing many different things with them. Which could be holding up a peace sign, letting your hand sit there free, or making an image by the shadow of your hand from the light. I want viewers to understand the differences between each image and each hand but also understand the variety of similarities between them all as well.