Alfred Stieglitz, Women artists and modem dance

Abstract

Abstract Alfred Stieglitz's portrait series of Georgia O'Keeffe has been seen as a highly personal — even intimate — record of the relationship between the photographer and his subject. Attempts to theorize the specificity of the visual codes at work in the pottrait series have recendy lead one scholar to link Stieglitz's approach with that of pornographic photography.1 Yet the nudity featured in a number of Stieglitz's pottraits shot between 1918 and 1924 combined with a lexicon of bodily gesture suggests not the illicit gaze of the pornographer, but instead stages a performance of a different kind. Stieglitz draws on the corporeal language of the Modem Dance movement in an attempt to give physical form to his conceptualization of the woman artist — a category which underwent a crucial redefmition during the first two decades of the century.