The photographer who exhibited Georgia O'Keeffe's work in 1916 was Alfred Stieglitz.
Stieglitz displayed a series of O'Keeffe's abstract charcoal drawings at his New York gallery, 291, without initially knowing her personally. The exhibition is widely treated as the beginning of her professional relationship with the leading American promoter of modern art.
O'Keeffe had mailed the drawings to her friend Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Stieglitz. He was impressed by their abstraction and exhibited them in April 1916. The event gave O'Keeffe access to a major modernist network and led to a long correspondence between the two artists.
The date matters because O'Keeffe's fame did not begin with her later flower paintings. Her first breakthrough involved nonrepresentational drawings, while her large-scale flowers, skyscrapers, and desert works became prominent in subsequent decades. Stieglitz and O'Keeffe married in 1924.