Sarah Greenough's NPR Interview on Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz

Yesterday on NPR’s Morning Edition, Susan Stamberg interviewed Sarah Greenough on her new book of letter correspondence: My Faraway One:  Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933. Unlike new 21^st-century ways of sending love notes such as texts and Facebook messages, which seem only to escalate dramatically at the mere click of a button, often to the regret of both sender and recipient, the love of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe was far deeper. He was her patron; she was his muse, and in photographs, she was his obsessively pursued subject. Instead of the familiar photographs and paintings that exemplify the couple as artists and patrons of American Modernist style, we now have that relationship intimately produced in their own words. In just over 30 years, they exchanged over 5,000 letters of no mean length—140 character-lengths barely take you past some of the scribbles and salutations—appearing now for the first time, per O’Keeffe’s stipulation at her death. The first volume includes nearly 700 letters edited by Greenough, who was hand-selected by O’Keeffe for the task of bringing the correspondence to publication. Listen on NPR for the interview and read an excerpt from the letters, with audio recordings of both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe.

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