Georgia O'Keeffe / John Loengard

In June 1966, photographer John Loengard was asked by Life magazine to photograph Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico, where she had been living since the late 1930s. Georgia O’Keeffe was 79 years old at the time, Loengard was 32, and for three days he observed and photographed the private life of this pioneer artist who virtually redefined American painting. For this unique book, we selected almost fifty of the finest black-and-white pictures Loengard took of the grand, solitary woman in the desert, and juxtaposed them with selected paintings of hers. They record the course of a day in the life of Georgia O’Keeffe from sunrise to sunset, developing their own quiet, mysterious effect. It becomes clear how much the austere poetry of the landscape corresponded to the artist’s own self-created world and how her artistic imagination was kindled by bleached bones and an infinite desert. Now available as a reduced size reprint.

The vast landscape of New Mexico won the heart of American artist Georgia O'Keeffe on her first visit there in 1917, and the open sky, parched earth, and bleached white bones she found there soon became the prominent subjects of her paintings. She granted John Loengard, a photographer for Life magazine, the rare opportunity to photograph her in her home at Ghost Ranch in 1966. Fifty of the black-and-white photographs he took that day fill this 79-page, small-format hardcover and form a classic record of a day in the life of an eminent yet elusive artist. Quotes by O'Keeffe about New Mexico and brief biographies of the painter and Loengard add extra dimension to the images