In 1929, Georgia O’Keeffe traveled to New Mexico at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Lujan. She returned there every summer until buying an abandoned hacienda in the village of Abiquiu in 1945 and settling there permanently in 1946 after the death of her husband, the photographer and gallery owner Joseph Stieglitz.
New Mexico seduced her at the same time as her photographer friends Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, whom she met through Stieglitz. They adopt identical themes whose skies and vernacular architecture testify to the permeability and intimacy of aesthetic intentions between photography and painting within the group.
Georgia O’Keeffe devoted the summers of 1929 and 1930 to the church of San Francisco de Assisi at the Spanish mission Ranchos de Taos, a late 18th century adobe building of which she made a series of 9 paintings.
In 1929, Adams chose the axis that she overexploited: the apse of the church, although she only painted the facade once. We can assume that she introduced him to the site and that the photographer had seen her work. Did he retain a framing that he finds emblematic? Is this a wink? Is it a question of style? Vintage? It is also the first vision that the visitor has upon arrival. The same goes for Weston. More precisely, he and Adams only shoot the same framing. Is this some kind of friendly competition between them all?
We can see there a loyalty to formalism on the part of the photographers. They are not interested in the interior of the building, which is more common, and concentrate on its exterior purity. We can also see before 1932, the outlines of the f64 group that they founded and after this date, the application of its principles: pure photography as an art independent of the graphic arts and defined by the constraints of the medium. Their aesthetic choice is sharpness as opposed to the artistic blur of pictorialism.
Only Paul Strand will use different axes around the church, like the painter. Her work on the church of San Francisco de Assisi will undoubtedly be closest to Georgia O’Keeffe’s approach to an unadorned building material that appears rooted in the ground. Strand will also make detailed plans such as that of the large buttress of the church whose austere form borders on abstraction.
The work of the photographers and the painter will make the church of Ranchos de Taos famous.
Is the connection between the faith of St. Francis of Assisi and Pueblo culture’s perception of the world present in photographers? For Strand probably, for the painter surely. In her colors, shapes, and lighting, Georgia O’Keeffe unites the Ranchos Church with sky and earth in a way that will evolve over the course of two summers of work, making the transition from ground to adobe walls increasingly imperceptible, anchoring and elevating the building toward the limitless space of the sky. The church blends with the earth and communicates with the sky, embodying the blend of Native American beliefs that God is in all things and Christianity.