Gertrude Käsebier

Gertrude Käsebier, Gertrude Stanton Kasebier, nee Stanton, ( born May 18, 1852 in Des Moines, Iowa, † October 13, 1934 in New York) was an American photographer. She is considered one of the most important representatives of pictorialism.

Life and work

She grew up in Colorado and moved to New York as a young Gertrude Stanton came to professional photography only in mature age. In 1874, she married Edward cheese beer, a businessman of German descent. In the late 1880s she graduated from art school at the Pratt Institute in New York. As a wife and mother of three children, she began occasionally to photograph their family in the 1890s. Only later, after further training at a portrait photographer, she opened her own studio in 1897 in New York.

With their portrait photographs she had rapidly economic success; in 1898 it was dedicated to an exhibition at the New York Camera Club. 1903 Alfred Stieglitz published in the first edition of his magazine for photography, Camera Work, six of her photographs, including the accompanying picture Blessed Are Among Though Woman.

Your image The Manger ( The Crib ) achieved in 1899 with $ 100 the highest selling price that had been paid to date for an art photography. Käsebier was recorded as the first woman in the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, in 1902 she was a founding member of the Photo-Secession. But because of differing views separated them from the significant influence of Secession Stieglitz and founded in 1910 as a rival union, the Picturial Photographers of America.

In addition to portrait photographs and in later times also landscapes Gertrude Käsebier is known for her romantic mother-child motifs, in which she gave the design of the tonal values ​​take precedence over compositional issues. Although the work of Gertrude Käsebier is not known for nude photography, she has made at least two images of undressed women, on the one hand, " The Bat " titled Photography from the years 1902 to 1904, was Jane White, wife of the photographer Clarence Hudson White model.