Dali House

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.

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.

Since 1885 they’ve been digging up dinosaurs at Ghost Ranch too, with fresh discoveries as recently as last year. O’Keeffe loved the region, as is clear enough from her paintings. “When I got to New Mexico,” she said, “that was mine.”

Below, “Hills, Lavandas, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico II” from 1935.

She first visited the state in 1917, travelling with her sister Claudia from their home in Canyon, Texas. She returned 12 years later and had a proper look around — and met Ansel Adams — and then in 1934 she made her way to Ghost Ranch. Despite her misgivings about staying on a dude ranch, she spent the first of many summers there. DH Lawrence and Charles Lindbergh came to see her, and of course Ansel Adams.

The owner, Nature magazine publisher Arthur Pack, eventually sold O’Keeffe his residence there, Rancho de los Burros, and seven acres, and for the winters she bought three acres in Abiquiu, 15 miles away, and spent the next few years shaping the crumbling adobe of an old mission into a home. It became her permanent residence after her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, died in New York.

In 1955 Ghost Ranch was gifted to the Presbyterian Church, but the new owners ensured O’Keeffe’s privacy and often helped her with repairs. She returned the favour when the ranch headquarters building was gutted by fire in 1983, donating $50,000 for rebuilding and expansion.

She hadn’t initially liked the idea of sharing turf with a Christian camp, but ironically she’d bought her home in Abiquiu from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe in 1945 — after a decade of trying. The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, which now maintains her last home in Sante Fe as a museum, pictured below, also runs the the Abiquiu property.

O’Keeffe still owned the ranch house and Abiquiu homestead when she died on the eve of her 99th birthday in Santa Fe.

It was from Ghost Ranch that the McAlpin party set out on September 27, 1937, to trek through northern New Mexico, Arizona and southwestern Colorado.

Canyon de Chelly outside Chinle, Arizona — 1,000 feet deep and 20 miles long, all stunning rock formations and vistas and the ruins of native American villages and cliff dwellings dating back to 1300 AD — was their first stop. There’s a great webpage about it here.

Google Earth imagery still hasn’t got hold of this rough country, but here’s a view of the canyon that’s pretty arty in its own way.

Adventure greeted them on their second day when a tremendous storm triggered flash floods that sent them scurrying for the canyon overlook. That was when Adams caught that moment with Georgia and Archie.