Photographs by Todd Webb
The photographer Todd Webb met Georgia O’Keeffe in the 1940s, at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place. O’Keeffe liked Webb and his work, and they became friends for life. Partly at O’Keeffe’s urging, Webb moved to New Mexico in the early 1960s, and he was a frequent guest at O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu. He often brought his camera.
Webb’s images from those visits provide a window into the painter’s daily life. O’Keeffe wore hats to protect her face, and scarves to protect her long, lustrous hair; she said you should never let your hair get sunburned. She wore crisp white collars, which turned whatever else she wore—black linen, blue denim—chic. She liked to make “Tiger’s Milk” for breakfast, a concoction of banana, skim milk, powdered milk, wheat germ, and brewer’s yeast, recommended by the nutritionist Adelle Davis. O’Keeffe kept a series of Chow dogs, which she loved for their loyalty and dignity, their massive beauty. Their coats were so thick that she had a shawl made from the sheddings. When her favorite dog, Bo, died, she buried him at the White Place, her name for the pale, majestic hills near Abiquiu that appear in many of her paintings. Years later, she wrote to Webb that she liked to think of Bo at night, still “running and leaping” through the hills.
Webb taught O’Keeffe how to use a camera. They photographed each other standing in the doorway at her house in Abiquiu. She once said that she’d bought the house because she was transfixed by that door, which she depicted in her paintings over and over, always empty. The images are austere and abstract: It’s hard to find the magic in the blank black rectangles. But O’Keeffe and Webb, each standing alone in the frame, reveal the doorway’s unearthly proportions: It was too wide for humans, too high for animals, too narrow for carriages. Who was it for? The gods.
This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “O’Keeffe in the Frame.”
