Overview

In 1902, after eight years of marriage, Anne Brigman saw a photography exhibition that changed her life. It awakened in her a passion as an artist -- an artist not just in photography but in the theater and in literature. She was awakened as a woman to levels of freedom and expression she had not enjoyed before. For her, this new calling was a fight and she was determined from the first to succeed in it. It wasn't long before her photographs of nude females posed in the Sierra Nevada Mountains were commanding attention internationally and in the influential photographic circles on the East Coast led by Alfred Stieglitz. Quickly she rose to a place among the highest ranks of those recognized as artistic photographers in the pictorialist period in photographic history. In 1910 she left her comfortable middle-class life and devoted herself completely to this life as an artist. And in this life she was constantly renewing herself. In her senior years she explored the gift for writing she had long known she had. She wrote poetry giving voice to the many beautiful photographs she had created over the years and combined these in two books of photographs and poems. Hers was a full, free life of artistic expression, a monument to the kind of freedom women across the society were longing for and finding in a variety of ways. In her later years Brigman developed romantic relationships with other women. This is the first study of Brigman to document and discuss her sexuality and its influence on her photography and poetry.

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James Rhem is an independent scholar in the history of photography. His previous books include Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater and Other Figurative Photographs (New York: D.A.P., 2002), the Photo Poche Ralph Eugene Meatyard (Paris: Editions Nathan, 2000), and the Phaidon 55 Aaron Siskind (London: Phaidon Press, 2003). He has written catalogue essays on Wynn Bullock (Chicago: Daiter Gallery, 2002) and articles on August Sander and William Eggleson for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's photography newsletter, fotoforum Fall/Winter 2002-2004, as well as numerous reviews of photographic exhibitions for local and regional publications. He took a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1979 and is the founding Executive Editor of The National Teaching & Learning FORUM, a publication on college teaching that he created in 1990. His involvement with photography, which began as a teenager, is both aesthetic and technical. He has been an exhibiting photographer whose work has been shown in nationally juried exhibitions. At least one of his regional exhibitions included only photography created via antique processes.

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