Alfred Stieglitz was a pioneering American photographer who made photography an accepted art form and authentic American art. His photography was influenced by the avant-garde European artists he championed. He was the son of German Jewish immigrants to the US. He married the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who painted magnified flowers, animal skulls, and desert landscapes in New Mexico.
Stieglitz had made more than 350 portraits of his wife by the time he retired from photography in 1937. In 1978, according to Barbara Butler Lynes, O’Keeffe wrote about how distant from them she had become,
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.
