Georgia O'Keeffe at Ghost Ranch: A Photo-Essay

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.