Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona

This photograph features the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and park guide Orville Cox on an excursion that departed from O’Keeffe’s New Mexican home, Ghost Ranch, in 1937. Though Ansel Adams is best known for his landscape photography, this portrait offers a rare glimpse at the personal relationships he developed as a photographer in the Western US. O’Keeffe (1887 – 1986), a landscape painter, met Adams in 1929 during a visit to collector Mabel Dodge Luhan’s compound in Taos, New Mexico. Luhan was a patron of Mary Austin’s and Adams’s book, Taos Pueblo. O’Keeffe was married to the famous Pictorialist photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, who was a major inspiration for Adams.