A magic moment with Georgia O’Keeffe
My sister had the wonderful taste to send me a birthday card some years back that featured this classic 1937 photograph by Ansel Adams. Taken at Canyon de Chelly National Monument, it shows Orville Cox and Georgia O’Keeffe, who looks for all the world like character from one of Carlos Castaneda’s metaphyical journeys.
I’ve tinted the black-and-white original, which was among those issued by the Ansel Adams estate during the ’90s and it’s widely available online now, with one website offering a mounted print signed by Adams for between $15,000 and $18,000. (You can get a knock-off poster for $12.)
Adams had taken one frame of O’Keeffe and Cox conversing, but Cox was blocking her, so he knelt down and got this shot. Over the years lots of people imagined there was something flirtatious in Georgia’s gaze. Henri Cartier-Bresson saw the picture for what it really was: simply one of those “decisive moments” when a photographer gets everything right.
Adams’ career-making US government commission to photograph the national parks was still four years away when his pal David Hunter McAlpin organised a month-long camping tour of the Southwest for him, O’Keeffe and McAlpin’s cousins Godfrey and Helen Rockefeller. Cox, their guide and interpreter, was the head wrangler at Ghost Ranch north of Abiquiu, New Mexico, which is currently more about soul than sagebrush.
This post concludes Dali House’s Long Island Beach Boys series (only because O’Keeffe studied art on the island): Part 1 with Max Ernst and the gang, Part 2 with other Long Island artists both older and younger, Part 3 with the Murphys and Picasso, Part 4 tracks Jackson Pollock’s rise, and Part 5 examines his demise.
O’Keeffe, originally a farmgirl from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, spent half a century in and around Ghost Ranch, and that’s where her ashes were scattered after she died in 1986. She painted flat-topped Mount Pedernal at its southern boundary numerous times. “It’s my private mountain,” she said. “God told me if I painted it often enough I could have it.”
Below is “Datura and Pedernal” from 1940.
