A Famous Photographer
October 31st, 2008
And now something a little different.
I recently received a copy of the Taschen book, Camera Work, The Complete Photographs, as a birthday gift from my wife. It’s a great book. Every photographer should have a copy in their library. This book will show you the starting point for photography as art. And it’s a beautiful starting point.
Pictorialism has often been ridiculed in recent times because of its attempts to be like painting instead of following the inherent qualities of the medium of photography. But seen in the proper context of the times and the goal of establishing photography as a legitimate medium for creating art, pictorialism was necessary and proper. And I would argue that there is value in the pictorialist approach even today.
But I’ll let that argument wait for another day because I want to talk about one of the pioneers of photography as an art form. And I want to mention that one inspiration for this post is the wonderful blog, museworthy, which I read and enjoy regularly. Her posts about artists provided the pattern for what I’m about to tell you about a great photographer. I’m not going to be nearly as articulate and thorough as she always is in her posts, but I’ll give it a try.
Looking through the Camera Work photographs I kept coming across photos that were clearly taken by someone with similar photographic interests to mine. The photographer is Anne (or Annie) Brigman. I had seen one of her photographs along the way as I studied the history of photography, but had never investigated her body of work. The first photo in this post is the photo that is most often associated with her.
But she did much more work, of course, and it was consistently, at least in her early work, concerned with the connection of the form of the female figure with the forms of nature. And the work is beautiful. Everyone shooting photos today of the nude in nature should be familiar with Brigman’s work because she was doing what we are trying to do and she did it extremely well. And she was possibly the first to work seriously with photography on this subject matter. And that was more than 100 years ago.
According to Wikipedia Brigman lived from 1869 to 1950. She died the year before I was born. She was born in Hawaii but spent much of her life in California. Her studio was in Oakland and was the center of art photography on the west coast at the time. She was published in Camera Work, was the only woman and only photographer living west of the Mississippi to be a member of the Photo-Secession.
From Wikipedia:
“Brigman’s deliberately counter-cultural images suggested bohemianism and female liberation. Her work challenged the establishment’s cultural norms and defied convention, instead embracing pagan antiquity. The raw emotional intensity and barbaric strength of her photos contrasted with the carefully calculated and composed images of Stieglitz and other modern photographers.”
Pretty amazing stuff for a woman at the beginning of the 20th Century.
Brigman was also an actress and a poet. She continued to photograph into the 1940s with her work becoming more modern as pictorialism fell out of favor. Her only book of her poetry illustrating her photographs was published in 1949 just before her death. It had been delayed for 8 years because of World War II.
The text accompanying a 1997 exhibit of Brigman’s work at the Oakland Museum of California says, “As a California photographer, she was revered by her West Coast colleagues, influencing a whole generation of prominent photographers that includes Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.
“Brigman’s favorite subject,” that text continues, “was the female nude, often posed outdoors in dramatic landscapes to suggest an intimate, immensely powerful connection to the natural world.”
Is it any wonder I am drawn to her work?
Of course, now I find myself wondering why it took me so long to find her work. I studied the history of photography in college. I read and look at photo books all the time. Anne Brigman doesn’t come up. Is it because she was “isolated” out on the west coast a century ago? Or because pictorialism is so often disrespected by “modern” photographers?
But she was was a major figure in the photo world of her day. What does that say about those of us who are minor figures or less in the photo world of today? Is there any hope for our work to survive us and be seen in the future? Does that matter at all? 
I don’t know the answers to those questions…and that doesn’t matter. I do what I do because it is how I see the world. I guess if others in the future come across what I’ve done and enjoy it, that’s a nice thing…but it can’t be the motivation for what I do today.
Thank you, Anne Brigman, for doing beautiful work. I wish I could have met you. I think we might have had a pleasant conversation. I’m sorry that couldn’t happen, but I’m very pleased that you left your photos here for me to enjoy.
I hope you all enjoy the photos Anne left for us as much as I do. These are just a few examples. I’ll be looking for a museum where I can see some of her original prints as I travel around the country in the future.
All photographs in this post are by Anne Brigman.
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