Anne W. Brigman, The Heart of the Storm, 1912Anne W. Brigman was born in 1869 in Hawaii. When she was 16, she moved to California, and trained as a painter, but in 1902 she turned t0 photography. This painting background would serve her well as a member of the art group started by Alfred Stieglitz called the Photo-Secession. In fact, she was the only Western photographer to be made a part of this group. The Photo-Secession strove to promote art photography, and especially photographic pictorialism. In their eyes, how a photographer manipulated an image to achieve a certain end was more important than what was actually in front of the camera. Photography should emulate the painting and etching of the time.
Brigman agreed with this school of thought, but her own images went one step further. Brigman's photos mainly concentrated on female nudes in primordial or natural settings. Her images were very controversial and counter-cultural, in that they emphasized female liberation and embraced "pagan antiquity." One source states that her work has "raw emotional intensity and barbaric strength."
In 1929, Brigman moved to Long Beach, California, and worked on a series of photographs of sand erosion. Brigman, like the other photo-secessionists, employed much burning and dodging, superimposition, and other editing techniques that are common today, but were innovative at the time.
Brigman's goal was to create powerful images of women, and she used the surrounding landscape to emphasize the strength of women in their natural state. The women she photographed took on the characteristics of the trees and rocks they were posed by, and sometimes seem to merge with them. Coming out of the constricting late Victorian period, Brigman's photographs were a declaration of defiance and freedom for women everywhere.
www.getty.edu/art/collections/bio/a1760-1.html
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