This photograph, one of more than three hundred images Stieglitz made of O'Keeffe (1887–1986) between 1917 and 1937, is part of an extraordinary composite portrait. Stieglitz believed that portraiture concerned more than merely the face and that it should be a record of a person's entire experience, a mosaic of expressive movements, emotions, and gestures that would function collectively to evoke a life. "To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person," he claimed, "is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still."
The met
