Wilson Centre for Photography: Anne Brigman (1869-1950)- Virtual Collect + Connect

Mary L. Bisbee with Anne Brigman

Portrait of Annie Brigman
1909. Platinum print. | 9 1/8 x 6 inches

Mary Bisbee, who had a photographic studio in downtown Berkeley, California from 1899-1905, took this portrait of Anne Brigman.

Anne Brigman

Melody
1904–05. Velox 'Carbon' gelatin silver print, printed circa 1910. | 6 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches

Anne Brigman emerged as a photographer during a cultural shift in values from the late-nineteenth century Victorian period to the modern era. She made her first photographs in 1901. Engaging family and friends as her models, her earliest photographs reflect and idealize Victorian views of womanhood and classical themes.

Anne Brigman

Captain Martin Brigman
1904. Gelatin silver print. | 7 3/4 x 4 3/4 inches

At the age of twenty-four, Anne Nott married Martin Brigman, a Danish sea captain twenty years her senior. Family members described the couple as “wild and free people,” and their marriage afforded Anne the opportunity to see the world while accompanying her husband at sea. Later she would refer to marriage, chores, and the responsibilities of her household as “domestic drudgery.”

Anne Brigman

Incantation
1905. Gelatin silver print. | 11 1/8 x 6 1/2 inches

The High Sierra offered Brigman a freedom unlike any other. “I wanted to go and be free,” she recalled of her ascent from the San Francisco Bay Area into the mountains. “I wanted the rough granite flanks of the mountains and the sweet earth…. I wanted to forget everything except that I was going back to heaven…. That was all I wanted.”

Anne Brigman

The Magic Pool
1906. Gelatin silver print. | 9 5/8 x 5 1/2 inches

“In all of my years of work with the lens, Brigman explained. “I’ve dreamed of and loved to work with the human figure— to embody it in rocks and trees, to make it part of the elements, not apart from them.”

Anne Brigman

The Water-Nixie
1909. Gelatin silver print, printed circa 1918. | 10 3/8 x 6 inches

Inspired by English writer and poet Edward Carpenter’s writings about the revival of an enchanted pagan world, Brigman embarked on photographic outings that could be described as performances. Her sisters and friends re-enacted the roles of divine spirits—such as nymphs, fauns, and dryads—in her outdoor pagan theater. In Germanic mythology and folklore, water nixies were feminine spirits who occupied rivers, streams, and other bodies of water.

Anne Brigman

The Soul of The Blasted Pine
1906. Gelatin silver print, printed 1907. | 7 11/16 x 9 5/8 inches

More than any other element of nature, Brigman was drawn to trees because she found beauty in what she saw as their struggle to survive. She compared their endurance to the human struggle, which she believed was necessary for personal and creative growth. In Soul of the Blasted Pine, Brigman suggests that nature and human suffering are one and the same; a beautiful nymph cries out as she realizes that her own death, as well as the death of her tree body, is imminent.

Anne Brigman

The Bubble
1906. Gelatin silver print. | 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Pictorialist photographers employed props like glass globes, crystal balls, or bubbles to suggest that artists had the power to discern a world beyond their everyday existence. "My biggest things are done in the mountains," Brigman explained. "The time I’m in the mountains is two months. In that two months there are trips on foot where the use of a model is impossible, even though there are wonderful charms. I realize that to a great degree my field of greatest and most individual expression is limited... there are plenty of snow banks—but not like my… Bubble."

Anne Brigman

The Witch Tree
circa 1908. Gelatin silver print. | 7 11/16 x 9 5/8 inches

Anne Brigman

The Breeze
1908–09. Gelatin silver print, printed 1915. | 9 5/8 x 7 3/8 inches

Brigman made this iconic self-portrait in the vicinity of Donner Pass near Lake Angela, a location that offered dramatic views of Donner Lake. Unlike pioneer photographer Carleton Watkins, who documented the same vista in 1875 to celebrate the triumph of the Transcontinental Railroad and American expansion, Brigman inserted her own body into the foreground—as if to reclaim the legendary summit as her own.

Anne Brigman

The Wondrous Globe
circa 1908–1910. Photogravure print on tissue, published in Camera Work number 38, 1912. | 4 3/4 x 7 7/8 inches

Anne Brigman

The Cleft of the Rock
circa 1907. Photogravure print on tissue, published in Camera Work number 38, 1912. | 9 1/2 x 5 1/8 inches

After Alfred Stieglitz discovered Brigman’s female nudes, such as The Cleft of the Rock, he adopted a more radical social program at Gallery 291 grounded in the writings of sexologists Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. Based on their theories, Stieglitz asserted that an artist’s erotic life and sexual drive was the source of his or her creative energy. Brigman’s images offered Stieglitz an authentic and powerful example of the fearlessness and freedom to which women could aspire. Stieglitz’s beliefs, however, were at odds with what Brigman felt her photographs represented.

Anne Brigman

The Heart of The Storm
circa 1912. Gelatin silver print, printed circa 1915. | 9 1/2 x 7 5/8 inches

Early in 1910, Anne Brigman embarked on an eight-month trip to the East Coast. She would eventually describe her time there as “one of the greatest storm centres” of her life. This photograph made two years after her return alludes to the personal storm she endured.

This print also offers insight into Brigman’s methodology. She often labored in her darkroom and studio, developing, retouching, scraping, painting, and preparing her negatives, interpositives, and internegatives on film and glass before making her final prints. The fantastical quality of her images led some to critique the authenticity of her negatives.

Anne Brigman

Woman by the Surf
1910. Platinum print. | 7 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches

After visiting Alfred Stieglitz in New York in 1910, Brigman left the city for the tranquility of photographer Clarence White’s inaugural summer school class at Five Islands, Maine. She was among a group of eight students who paid forty dollars for the three-week course in photography, which promised technical instruction in a remote coastal setting described as “fifteen hundred acres of storm-beaten cliffs, bold headlands, islands and reefs, hard, clean sand beaches, salt rivers and lagoons, lakes, brooks and wood.

Anne Brigman

Infinitude
1910. Gelatin silver print. | 9 5/8 x 5 1/2 inches

Brigman wrote Stieglitz a cheery letter about her time in Maine at Clarence White’s summer school, filled with descriptions of herself swimming, posing for her classmates, and having a wonderful time. Her correspondence suggests that Maine offered the respite she so desperately needed after her unsettling experience in New York City. Evidence suggests, however, that her experience in Maine may not have been fully nurturing. In her images from this time, like Infinitude, a tiny, female figure appears dwarfed against a vast landscape, suggesting isolation and melancholy.

Anne Brigman

The Storm Tree
circa 1911. Gelatin silver print, printed 1912. | 7 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches

Anne Brigman’s time in New York forced her to address many of the issues set into motion on her trip to the East Coast in early 1910. Not only did she begin to reassess her relationship with Stieglitz and his East Coast brand of modernism, she also started to question the domestic obligations of her marriage to Martin Brigman. Upon her return to Oakland, she decided to live apart from her husband. “My pictures,” she declared, “tell of my freedom of soul, of my emancipation from fear.”

Anne Brigman

Via Dolorosa
circa 1911. Gelatin silver print, printed circa 1912. | 9 1/2 x 7 5/8 inches

Brigman made some of her most dramatic and violent images along the northern California coast during a period of personal crisis from 1911-1913. Made shortly after her return from New York, Via Dolorosa suggests the personal anguish Brigman endured as she attempted to assert herself as an independent woman. Brigman wrote to Stieglitz that this image was an extension of her earlier works, and “the passionate struggle of the evolving consciousness—the fight for clean, strong freedom of body and soul—which are one.”

Anne Brigman

The Strength of Loneliness
1910. Gelatin silver print, printed 1914. | 7 5/8 x 9 5/8 inches

By 1915, Anne Brigman’s colleagues and friends considered her a leader in the San Francisco Bay Area artistic community. She wrote art criticism and openly shared her opinions about current art exhibitions and issues in photography. With Pictorialism on the wane, Brigman chose to look inward, creating a series of meditative and introspective portraits suggesting a heightened awareness of her modern “self.”

Anne Brigman

The Shadow on My Door
1921. Gelatin silver print. | 9 3/4 x 7 3/16 inches

[Edward Weston, Johan Hagemeyer, Roi Partridge, Imogen Cunningham, Roger Sturtevant, Dorothea Lange, Helen MacGregor]<br><br>St Anne of the Crooked Halo

Anne Brigman

[Edward Weston, Johan Hagemeyer, Roi Partridge, Imogen Cunningham, Roger Sturtevant, Dorothea Lange, Helen MacGregor]

St Anne of the Crooked Halo
1920. Gelatin silver print. | 9 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches

When Edward Weston paid a visit to the Bay Area in 1920, Dorothea Lange hosted a gathering for her photographer-friends at her home in Berkeley. Those attending the party—including Weston, Brigman, Johan Hagemeyer, Roi Partridge, Imogen Cunningham, Roger Sturtevant, and Helen MacGregor—staged a satirical tableau in the style of a religious passion play. Here, the group of devotees poses at the feet of an exalted Brigman. While the tableau was humorous, it is also a testament to the respect this group of friends and colleagues had for Brigman.

Anne Brigman

Tryst
1931. Gelatin silver print. | 6 1/2 x 8 7/8 inches

In 1929, at the age of sixty, Anne Brigman moved to southern California, where she lived for the final twenty-one years of her life. The move signaled a pivotal turning point in her life and creative work.

While living in Long Beach, a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean, Brigman renewed her deep connection to the sea, a source of countless childhood memories in Hawaii. She frequented the beaches of the Pacific Ocean, turning her attention—and her camera—to the shoreline, the sand, and the ocean.

Anne Brigman

Untitled. Seascape
1935. Gelatin silver print. | 7 1/2 x 9 5/16 inches

Anne Brigman

Untitled. Study of sand erosion
circa 1935. Gelatin silver print. | 7 5/8 x 9 3/4 inches

While living in southern California, Brigman photographed the Pacific Ocean shoreline, emphasizing expansive beaches and spacious skies. One morning she discovered what she called “sand erosions,” recounting, “here on the shining sand … I saw for the first time the patterns cut by the drainage of the outgoing tide.” Brigman photographed the close-up details and abstract geometric patterns she saw in the sand.

Anne Brigman

Cadencia
1934. Gelatin silver print. | 7 1/4 x 9 inches

Anne Brigman

Prelude
1931. Gelatin silver print. | 6 7/8 x 9 1/4 inches

Anne Brigman

Star-Treader
1929. Gelatin silver print. | 6 1/2 x 9 5/8 inches

Anne Brigman

Songs of a Pagan
1949. Book of poems and photographs, published by Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho. | 7 5/8 x 9 3/4 inches

In her book of poetry, Songs of a Pagan, Brigman expressed passion, mourned loss, dreamed of freedom, and welcomed death. Written, designed, and edited entirely by Brigman, the publication paired thirty-eight poems with thirty-eight photographs. And was published one year before Brigman’s death. Stieglitz penned a special frontispiece for Songs of a Pagan in the form of a letter emphatically declaring Brigman’s important contribution to the field of photography. “The photographers of distinction are rarer than ever,” he wrote. “One who has achieved deserved distinction amongst camera workers is Anne Brigman.”

Anne Brigman

Ballet de Mer
1913. Gelatin silver print. | 9 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches

Brigman’s poem, Nirvana (first stanza):

I have left my mountains/ I have come to the sea/ Gone are my peaks and granite wilds/ And the glorious twist of the juniper tree.