John Loengard

The photographer John Loengard was just thirty when Life magazine sent him to the barren wastes of New Mexico in 1966 and 1967 to take a series of photographs for the eightieth birthday of Georgia O’Keeffe. The great lady of American painting had been living on her own at Ghost Farm near Abiquiu for twenty years. Already enjoying a world-wide reputation, O’Keeffe had decided to leave New York, the heart of civilization, after the death of her husband Alfred Stieglitz in 1946 and retreat to the unspoilt setting of a Native American reservation. She died in Santa Fe twenty years later in 1986, shortly after celebrating her ninety-ninth birthday. This book presents a selection of photographs taken by Loengard of the wonderful and solitary lady of the desert alongside some of her paintings. This juxtaposition sheds surprising light on how the desert landscape and the artist’s everyday life are reflected in the motifs of her paintings and shows the extent to which her artistic imagination was fuelled by the raw reality of her ascetic hermitage in the desert of New Mexico.