Georgia O'Keeffe, Elizabeth Davidson, and Fred Varnum c. 1920

This photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe, Elizabeth Davidson, and Fred Varnum was taken by Alfred Stieglitz sometime during his life before 1946. Stieglitz used the camera to capture a moment, but it's a constructed moment. The tones are soft, almost velvety, focusing on the human figures rather than the landscape. You can feel the grass, the weight of the water in the bowl. The image is of three people outdoors. O’Keefe is caught in the act of pouring something from a bowl, Elizabeth is kneeling with a rack of paintings and Fred stands behind them, watching. It’s a tender scene. It reminds me of the work of someone like David Hockney, who used photography as a basis for painting and who also had this talent for capturing the nuances of everyday life with a sense of theatrical composition. Art is never just a mirror, it’s a lens, it helps us see things anew, to find meaning and poetry in the mundane.