O Keeeffe As I See Her By Hiller Summary

Hiller explains and depicts her point of view on Georgia O’Keeffe in the second chapter of the first section O’Keeffe As I See Her. She does so in a very personal manor, starting by the depiction of a photograph of the artist she’d cut out of a magazine and “pinned up in her college dorm room in 1960 or thereabouts”, when she was around 18 or so. She goes on to describe the relationship she had with this photograph and the image of O’Keeffe, not just as what she did in her work, but as she was/is represented in the photograph itself. Hiller explains the misconstrued vision she had of this women, and the reflection that was implemented when comparing herself to this image of the artist (of the female artist).
“I realized I had been looking at O’Keeffe as though peering into a mirror to get a glimpse of myself, trying to see some of the contradictory aspects of her importance for me, and for so many other artists.
For one thing, it shows me that the frame of this mirror is too constricting, the reflection of O’Keeffe takes up the whole surface, it’s too binary, just me and her, with no space for background or context” 3
She then goes on to describe the physical images, the photographs taken of O’Keeffe, whom most had been taken by Stieglitz (yet not the photograph pined to the wall). And that most of these photographs displayed O’Keeffe as the subject; by this I mean that there was no photographs of her working, her painting, but only images of her as the artists model. Hiller found this puzzling, objectifying in some sense, or at least pointing out that the issue