Georgia O'Keeffe

"Stieglitz photographed me first at his gallery "291" in the spring of 1917. … My hands had always been admired since I was a little girl—but I never thought much about it. He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow—in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways—also my head—and I had to turn this way and that. … Stieglitz had a very sharp eye for what he wanted to say with the camera. When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. … His idea of a portrait was not just one picture. His dream was to start with a child at birth and photograph that child in all of its activities as it grew to be a person and on throughout its adult life. As a portrait it would be a photographic diary."

Georgia O'Keeffe, 1978