Little Good Harbor, Maine by Gertrude Käsebier
10"x8" ($40) | 14"x11" ($85) | 20"x16" ($275) | 24"x20" ($675)
If you haven’t heard of pioneering 19th century photographer Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934), you’re not alone–like so many non-male artists who boldly advanced their artistic forms, Käsebier has rarely shown up in syllabi or textbooks. Her foundational Pratt Institute training in drawing and painting is gorgeously present in her wide-ranging photographic work, which touches on and/or predates canon staples like Man Ray, Fra Angelico, Goya, Picasso and Alice Neel. Little Good Harbor, Maine, shot c.1913, shares tone and form with many of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings–dreamlike, gauzy, fluid, bold. The image itself seems like it would be velvety to the touch: a moment captured in that liminal state between sleep and waking life where senses blur and the mind is still.
In her penetrating portraiture of the Sioux tribe, artists like Robert Henri and John Sloan, her experimental self-portraits, and her dreamy landscape pieces, her discerning eye and brilliant compositional sense reign supreme.
Gertrude Käsebier, c. 1900, platinum print by Samuel H. Lifshey, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art Library
Käsebier may not be a household name now, but during her career, she reached dizzying heights. Alfred Stieglitz called her "beyond dispute, the leading artistic portrait photographer of the day" in 1899. The noted Newark (Ohio) Photography Salon called her "the foremost professional photographer in the United States”, and she was lauded by Joseph Keiley, a leading critic of the time. She wasn’t just publicly crowned–she got her gold, too. In 1899, a print of her piece The Manger sold for $100, the largest amount ever fetched for a photograph (nearly $4,000 in today’s dollars).
Her ability to earn a good living from both her commercial and fine artwork was something she prized and promoted to women as a promising and profitable career path. So much so that she founded the Women's Professional Photographers Association of America in the first years of the 1900s…she also joined the esteemed group Professional Photographers of New York. Her business acumen and professional ambitions caused an about face from Steiglitz, who objected to the idea that fine artists should receive money for their work. Although she was a founding member of his Photo-Seccession movement, which promoted photography as a fine art form and championed the aesthetic movement of photographic pictorialism (fine art photography that is intentionally artistically manipulated in order to evoke emotion), the two distanced themselves from each other as time went on.
Little Good Harbor, Maine is a prime example of Käsebier’s mastery of photographic pictorialism as a style. The movement prized the very qualities this piece displays in spades, principally its lack of sharp focus and otherworldly, ruminative aura. Working against the idea that photography was a documentational tool meant to create a straightforward image, photographic pictorialism unquestionably opened portals to new dimensional possibilities in the art form. This piece embodies one such dimension: it sits between reality and fantasy, the romantic and the concrete, the created and the pre-existing. We are all lucky to step into Käsebier’s hazy world.
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