ABSTRACT
Anne Brigman was a member of Alfred Stieglitz’s elite New York-based photography group known as the Photo-Secession. Stieglitz published Brigman’s photographs featuring nude women in wild landscapes in Camera Works, the wide circulation of which lead to her work featuring in several important European exhibitions and her winning international acclaim. However, the chapter also argues that her feminist vision of the modern woman was fundamentally at odds with Stieglitz’s, and that this together with her refusal to abandon the Pictorialist style in favour of the ‘straight style’ caused the two photographers to eventually fall out. The chapter further argues that although Brigman claimed to identify with the Photo-Seccession, her life’s work increasingly reflected an American West Coast sensibility and that by the late 1920s she had moved away from nudes and was concentrating instead on the abstract patterns to be found in nature and the unique qualities of the Californian light. It further argues that despite her using the Sierra Nevada mountains as a backdrop for her nudes, she never registered the fact that her artistic sojourning there was afforded by the forced removal of its original inhabitants.
