ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation / Thesis: “LIVING ON PAPER ...

of Stieglitz are among the very sensitive records of human existence. So vivid and
delicate are they that one wants to touch them.” 87
Stieglitz’s friend the critic Lewis
Mumford rejoiced at the photographer’s successful
endeavor . . . to translate the unseen world of tactile values as they develop
between lovers not merely in the sexual act but in the entire relationship of two
personalities – to translate this world of blind touch into sight, so that those who
felt could more clearly see what they felt, and so those who could merely see
might reach, through the eye, the level of feeling. . . . It was his manly sense of
the realities of sex, developing out of his own renewed ecstasy in love, that
resulted in some of Stieglitz’s best photographs. In a part by part revelation of a
woman’s body in the isolated presentation of a hand, a breast, a neck, a thigh, a
leg, Stieglitz achieved the exact visual equivalent of the report of the hand or the
face as it travels over the body of the beloved. 88
In his images of O’Keeffe with her art photographic touch met and merged with graphic
and human touches.
Sexuality and Gender in Stieglitz’s Photographs of O’Keeffe
As Mumford realized so keenly, the power of the communicative hand belongs
both to art and to sexuality. Perhaps inadvertently by attracting attention to the marks of
her fingers in her 1915 drawings, O’Keeffe had aroused not only aesthetic but sexual
reactions in Stieglitz and other viewers. In his photographs of O’Keeffe posed nude or
partially nude with her drawings, I believe that Stieglitz intended to replicate and
exaggerate his initial sexual response to O’Keeffe’s abstract drawings. In this way he
worked against the direction in which O’Keeffe was taking her own art. He kept visible
in his photographs the artist’s earlier stress on touch and physicality even as the artist
herself strove to hide the touch of her hands. As Anne Wagner says, Stieglitz’s
photographs of O’Keeffe are an effective means of keeping “their maker’s femininity
well in mind,” identifying O’Keeffe and her art with her body.” 89
Stieglitz certainly had
no fears that his expressions of artistic creativity through photographs of O’Keeffe’s
364