Anne Brigman American, 1869-1950

Anne Brigman (1869–1950) photographed the nude female figure in the high Sierra Nevada and made it part of the landscape rather than a subject placed within it. “In all my years of work with the lens,” she wrote, “I have dreamed of and loved to work with the human figure, to embody it in rocks and trees, to make it part of the elements, not apart from them.” The figures are often her own, and in the photographs it is frequently impossible to tell where rock ends and body begins—which was precisely the point.

Born in Honolulu in 1869 and raised in California, Brigman came to photography in her thirties and worked from a base in Oakland, climbing into the Sierra with a camera and camping for weeks at a time to make her pictures. She was also a poet and critic, an advocate of the Arts and Crafts philosophy, and a mountaineer. She published a book of poems, Songs of a Pagan, in 1949. “My pictures tell of my freedom of soul,” she wrote in 1913, “of my emancipation from fear.”

Alfred Stieglitz elected her to the Photo-Secession in 1903 and published her work in Camera Work, making her the only member based on the West Coast. They corresponded from 1903 to 1944, exchanging nearly 100 letters, and he championed her as a modern photographer rather than a regional Pictorialist. Critics accused her of staging her landscape photographs in a studio, a charge she vigorously denied.

Her work draws on nineteenth-century Romanticism, Hawaiian ritual, and pagan mythology. The nudes were radical for their time and remain so; the term “feminist art” would not be coined for nearly seventy years after she made them. In the 1920s, she began restaging some of her earlier photographs, among them Invictus (1925). Stieglitz, meanwhile, declared her moment over and went in search of another woman artist to serve as muse and partner, finding one in Georgia O’Keeffe.

Brigman moved to Southern California in her later years and died at Eagle Rock in 1950. In 2018, the Nevada Museum of Art gave her the first major retrospective, bringing together 250 photographs from public and private collections, accompanied by a 400-page publication that included her writings, correspondence with Stieglitz, and previously unseen negatives.