This image first caught my eye a few years ago. I like it. I notice the way the hands stand out, are isolated from the subject’s body, are celebrated in an unexpected way. The beauty that Alfred Stieglitz draws our attention to is neither glitzy nor glamorous. He challenges our sense of beauty: what beauty is and where beauty comes from. Seeming to at once claw at and grapple with themselves, these hands are engaged in struggle and creation. They are the hands of Georgia O’Keefe.
Alfred Stieglitz took hundreds of portraits of O’Keefe. In doing a little background hunting on this image, I read that he considered each image of her hands to be a portrait in itself. Her identity, he thought, couldn’t be captured by any single image. For Stieglitz, a photograph did not halt the ever-changing world. Rather, it merely interrupted it. This image of O’Keefe’s hands is also an interruption. While time is stopped in the image, she exists beyond it – in other capacities and in other portraits of her. In these moments of interruption we see his feelings towards the subject rather than any objective truth about O’Keefe.
In Hands there seems to be little pretense of context. If Stieglitz is persuading in this image, which I’m not entirely sure he is, his persuasion is couched in his celebration of the explicit ambiguity of the image he has captured. He acknowledges the discontinuity from which the meaning of the image emerges -- two hands floating, detached from the human form. Here, authenticity is perhaps beside the point. Perhaps, all that is authentic is the viewer’s response to the image, an image that is celebrating more than just some hands – some nice hands that we can appreciate whether or not we know that they belong to Georgia O’Keefe. What is most authentic is perhaps the meaning that the viewer brings to the gap between certainty and uncertainty, known and unknown that is created by this interruption: the tortured and grasping hands of a creator.
Is this image rhetorical? Are we being persuaded of something? Is this image responding to or conspiring with the rise of positivism and the dying social function of subjectivity that Berger observes in Another Way of Telling? How is the rhetoricity of this image different than the rhetoricity of an image of mass-consumption such as Ground Zero Spirit?
What a great image! I was just in the Georgia O'Keefe museum in Santa Fe this summer--it was great. The hands do seem, as you say, to grapple and claw at each other. The positioning of the hands also seems dance-like, and similar to part of the ASL sign for "Jesus" (which I don't think is intentional, just interesting).
ReplyDeleteWhile the rhetoricity of this image doesn't seem as cut and dry as that of Ground Zero Spirit, I think the same ideas of the symbol could come into play. Hands in our culture are symbolic of artists and laborers. "Working with one's hands" has a positive connotation of being one with oneself and the environment around oneself. I think hands, as a symbol, are respected in a way that could be interestingly compared to the flag as a symbol.