Gertrude Käsebier

Born Gertrude Stanton in Des Moines, Iowa, the artist married Eduard Käsebier in 1873. She did not begin studying art until her three children had started high school, when she trained as a painter at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (1889-93) and in Crécy-en-Brie, France, during the summers of 1893 and 1894. She was about forty when she shifted her focus to photography. Intent on learning all facets of the medium, she first became apprenticed to a German photographic chemist and then, in order to learn the business of photography, to a portrait photographer in Brooklyn. In the late nineteenth century, women photographers were considered amateurs, incapable of professional work.(1) Challenging this notion, Käsebier opened her own portrait studio in 1897 on Fifth Avenue in New York. Success came quickly, and she enjoyed an impressive list of famous and wealthy clients as well as regular exhibitions in New York and Philadelphia and critical acclaim.

In 1902 Käsebier became a founding member of the Photo-Secession Group, which included Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn. Leading exponents of Pictorialism, they considered photography a fine art equal to painting or sculpture, rather than mere mechanical reproduction. In an effort to evoke associations with painting, they used darkroom manipulations to produce soft tonal gradations, blurred details, and experimental light effects. Käsebier in particular was known for retouching negatives or rephotographing altered photographic prints.

In the 1910s the Photo-Secession disbanded, but Käsebier continued making photographs in this mode; in 1916 she became a founding member of the Pictorial Photographers of America. She worked until 1927, retiring from professional photography at age seventy-five. She died with the reputation of being "one of the finest photographers in the world."(2)

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NOTES:

1 . Sarah Hermanson Meister, "Crossing the Line: Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Käsebier as Professionals and Artists," in Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz, eds., "Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art" (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), pp. 125, 137.

2 . Quoted in Nancy G. Heller, "Women Artists: Works from the National Museum of Women in the Arts"(Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, in association with Rizzoli, 2000), p. 92.