Sometimes the most revealing and evocative photographic portraits are not images of faces at all. Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he met in 1916 and married in 1924, is part of a groundbreaking series of several hundred portraits he made of her over twenty-some years. This cropped view of her hands posed elegantly with a silver thimble is characteristic of these often fragmentary portrayals, which together Stieglitz felt captured her essence in a way that no single image ever could. Indeed, many years after her husband's death, O'Keeffe claimed: "When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me . . . I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives."

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