End frame: Road from Abiquiú (1964-68) by Georgia O’Keeffe

Anna McNay

Anna McNay is an art writer, editor and curator based in the woods of Hertfordshire, UK. She has considerable experience of writing catalogue essays, as well as reviews, profiles, interviews and features for online and print publications. She frequently conducts live interviews and hosts and speaks on panels at galleries and art schools.

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I have images I love wholly aesthetically, in which I would like to be lost, and at which I could sit and look for hours; then, as a writer, I have images I love because of their complexity or context and the different angles they offer for exploration or the stories they tell about their creation. This – Road from Abiquiú (1964-68) by Georgia O’Keeffe – is one of the latter.

O’Keeffe is part of the story of modernist photography whether she likes it or not. She was married to Alfred Stieglitz, who took more than 300 photographic portraits of her (some of an explicitly erotic nature), and she was friends with the likes of Paul Strand and Edward Steichen. She was clear about her artistic goal from the outset, however, stating: ‘I want to be a painter, just a painter.’ Nevertheless, she also said: ‘Art must be a unity of expression so complete that the medium becomes unimportant – only noted or remembered as an afterthought.’ Accordingly, the photographs that O’Keeffe took in her later life (from the mid-1950s onwards) overlap significantly with her paintings in terms of (often abstracted, if not abstract) form and composition, light and shadow.