…most of the evening was devoted to Alfred Stieglitz. Patti Smith read aloud from many of Stieglitz’s letters, especially from the year 1918, “a vintage year for Alfred,” according to Smith, when his relations with O’Keeffe were at their most innocently ecstatic, before their temperamental differences had emerged clearly. Two years earlier, a friend had brought a pile of O’Keeffe’s daringly abstract charcoal drawings to Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, and he had been astonished by their confident audacity.
This is where the surprise came for me. I had the read the volume of their correspondence, all 800 pages of it, and found myself impatient with Stieglitz’s voice, which I found pompous, self-indulgent, condescending, and repetitious. But Patti Smith found an unexpected lyricism in Stieglitz’s declamatory repetitions, not unlike the incantatory and intimate lyrics of her own songs. She was also able to convey, with the tilt of her head and the tone of her voice, what it might have been like to receive these letters—to be, as she expressed it in Just Kids, the photograph. More here.