Alfred Stieglitz & Georgia O’Keeffe Letters Project

September 25, 2011

The Beiencke Library is pleased to announce the completion of several related projects designed to make the correspondence between photographer, gallerist, and arts advocate Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O’Keeffe more accessible to students, scholars, and general readers for research and reading.

The projects are rooted in the Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe Papers, one the Yale Collection of American Literature’s richest archival collections. This archive, a gift to Yale from Georgia O’Keeffe, supplemented by additional gifts from the Stieglitz family and other donors, has long supported important research not only into the lives and work of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, but also the work of many of their contemporaries, the development of modernist aesthetics, and many other subjects ranging from the history of photography to the culture and landscape of the American southwest.

The present projects open the Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Papers to scholars, students, and general readers in several new ways. The publication of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933, edited by Sarah Greenough, makes this compelling correspondence available outside the Beinecke Library reading room for the first time. (About:  My Faraway One at Yale University Press).

Alongside the publication of My Faraway One, the Beinecke Library has completed digitization projects which make related Stieglitz and O’Keeffe archival materials available to scholars in the library and at a distance online. The projects include complete description and scanning of all the materials associated with the Stieglitz and O’Keeffe correspondence, and seamless online organization and access to both metadata and high resolution image files (Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive Image Guide ; Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive Finding Aid with links to images of Stieglitz/O’Keeffe letters). These projects simultaneously preserve and protect the fragile archival documents and make them fully accessible in their entirety to scholars all over the world.

My Faraway One was published jointly by the Yale University Press and the Beinecke Library with the generous support of William Reese, Y’77.