Rebecca's Ear, 1922

Rebecca 'Beck' Salsbury became close friends with Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe soon after she married Paul Strand in 1922. During the summer of that year, when Paul Strand was away on assignment, Stieglitz took experimental portraits and snapshots of Rebecca at Lake George, where both couples would go on to jointly spend many of their summers. This enigmatic image with Stieglitz's playful inscription appears to be a detail from a portrait of Rebecca entitled Rebecca Salsbury Strand, taken the same year (fig. 1, Sarah Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs, Volume One 1886-1922, Abrams/National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2002, no. 743).

Stieglitz wrote the following in a note to Rebecca Strand on November 1, 1922:

I have some beautiful prints of you – & waxed – spotted – ready to be mounted. But they really need no mounting – no presentation. They just are. How you'll like them as 'Portraits' I don't know. As prints, as photographs, everyone will have to like them. They exist. So your work & kind willingness have not all been in vain. And I'm glad. And Paul will be glad too when he sees the results. They are entirely different from his things of you. Perhaps they will clarify some things.

(The above letter, as published in: Sarah Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs, Volume One 1886-1922, Abrams/National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2002, p. 447.)