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Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) 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.