Georgia on my Mind

“"We had faces, then..."

(Georgia O’Keeffe, photo by Yousuf Karsh)

It amazes me how some important bits from our lives can lie dormant, just waiting patiently to resurface many years later. Sort of like cicadas, but not as loud.

I always wanted to be a journalist, but when I got to the fork in the road where I had to choose between writing and photography, I hesitated. I was already spending most of my money on camera equipment, had my own darkroom, and I loved experimenting in black and white.

But writing was fun, too. I guess it could have gone either way.

The opportunity for me to get paid for arranging words on paper presented itself sooner than the chance to earn a living from 35 mm film, so the rest is history. I have no regrets.

Around 1968, in my second year at The Indianapolis News, I spent what must have seemed like a fortune at the time, to buy a new book. “The Karsh Portfolio” was a collection of the work of Yousuf Karsh, the Canadian who was one of the finest portrait photographers of the 20^th century. Many of his photos are iconic, in every sense of that word.

It was my first coffee table book, before I even owned a coffee table to put it on.

Whether or not you are aware of it, you have seen Karsh’s work – his Ernest Hemingway, his George Bernard Shaw, his Winston Churchill – and by the way, he said he got Churchill to make that grumpy face by taking away his cigar the instant before the shutter was tripped.

(Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Frost, Helen Keller, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein. Photos by Yousuf Karsh)

The Karsh portraits are beyond stunning, and for each one the photographer wrote something about the photo-shoot and the subject.

Karsh loved his portrait of George Bernard Shaw, and apparently so did the playwright. Shaw once autographed a copy by scrawling his name on the back of it, explaining, “I was careful to make sure that my signature should not detract from my face.”

I opened this book so many times, eventually the binding ceased to do its job. But without question, the portrait that ambushed me was his Georgia O’Keeffe. Something about it just stopped me in my tracks, every time.

There was the artist, looking away from the camera. She was seated under some elk antlers on a hard adobe bench, with a decrepit wooden door partly visible.

I showed that photo to anybody who would look at it, and it became a part of my soul. As I said, sometimes these things burrow deep, and they are prepared to wait as long as it takes to pay us another visit.

Fast-forward half a century, during which a few other things happened in my life. Love, marriage, parenthood, a career that took me around the world and back. One by one, those sleeping cicadas have emerged to become the personal memories I am now sharing as my “5 a.m. Stories.”

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Barbara and I lived for eight years when we stopped being journalists, familiarity with O’Keeffe’s work is mandatory. We would take out-of-town visitors to a downtown museum devoted to her art, making sure we began each tour with a short film narrated by another Santa Fe resident, actor Gene Hackman.

Visiting that museum was the easy part of a Georgia O’Keeffe pilgrimage. The real die-hards told us we needed to see Abiquiu, where for many years she had her home and studio, and where, in 1956, Yousuf Karsh had brought his equipment to shoot her portrait.  

Going to Abiquiu involves a one-hour drive from Santa Fe – we knew we were getting close when we saw Bodes, a remote outpost of a general store that had every single thing we would ever need in life and offered our last chance to buy it before driving off the edge of the earth.

Bodes describes itself as “Being of service to travelers, hunters, pilgrims, stray artists, and bandits since 1893.”  How could you not love that?

Once we passed Bodes we began to see the background scenery for every Western movie we had ever seen. This was also Looney Tunes territory. We fully expected to see Wile E. Coyote rolling a boulder off of a mesa.

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque!”

We saw the flat-topped Pedernal, the inspiration for many of O’Keeffe’s paintings. She often claimed the mountain as her own. “It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it,” she said.

When she died, in 1986, her ashes were scattered there.

We stopped at nearby Ghost Ranch, which boasts tempting hikes like Kitchen Mesa and Box Canyon. The winds whip up something fierce in those parts, and when they do, turn around and don’t be a hero. You also need to make sure you’ll be back indoors before the sun gets intolerable and leaves you looking like those elk antlers in the O’Keeffe portrait.

We’re talking 6,400 feet above sea level, so bear that in mind in case breathing is one of your hobbies.

I digress. I was talking about the O’Keeffe Home Tour, which we decided to try in 2015.

The artist’s hacienda is a study in sparseness. Some people who achieve her monumental success enjoy the rewards of a lush life. O’Keeffe preferred the plywood life. The furnishings were beyond plain. It was as if she wasn’t even going to try competing with the glorious mountains looming outside every window.

(Photo by Susan Bruno)

After exhausting the sights of the house, we left it to cross the courtyard to O’Keeffe’s studio, and that’s when I saw it. The exact setting of the portrait I had so adored for so long. The antlers, the bench, the doorway. Everything but the artist herself.

I recognized it instantly, the tableau I had first seen in a book a lifetime ago. I was standing just where Yousuf Karsh had stood, and gaping slack-jawed at the spot where the artist had posed.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Home Tour, Abiquiu, New Mexico. Come for the art, stay for the time-travel, déjà vu, out-of-body surprise of your life.