Meet Gertrude Käsebier
Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits
Video Transcription
Gertrude Käsebier is a very progressive woman at the turn of the century (1900). Käsebier is born in Iowa, her family moves to Colorado just before the Civil War, and they live in Golden, Colorado. The family very much wants what's best for the children. At the outbreak of the Civil War, they move back to New York closer to her mother's family. Gertrude is nurtured. She's nurtured to be a strong woman. She's sent to the Moravian Seminary Girls' School in Pennsylvania and she develops as strong a personality I believe as her mother had from the readings we've been able to do during this research.
When she returns to New York, she's living at home with her mom who's running a boarding house, she's meeting a lot of different people, she's interested in art, marries Edward Käsebier, and begins a life as a wife and a mother. But she also has other aspirations. She decides to go back to school to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and study painting. She's very successful. She travels with some of her instructors to Europe and she takes along a camera on one of those summer trips. She's leading students, working with her professors, and learning new techniques — but she's also beginning to take some snapshots. She carries with her an early handheld camera and really pretty much infuriates her instructors because they want her to focus on her painting techniques and her skills and to grow as an artist.
So she continues to be the wife, the mother, the daughter that is a very traditional role at the time, but she also sees that she might be able to have a career. Surprisingly enough, it's not in painting, but it's in photography. She defies her instructors and she begins to think about apprenticing back in New York and also starting her own commercial studio in the Women's Building on Fifth Avenue in New York City. That happens in 1897.
After her long career with Pratt, she continues to maintain her friendships with the professors even though she's taking a different path than they originally hoped for her. She starts immediately to have success photographing businessmen, artist friends, socialites, and the women of New York.
But there's one time where she's taking a glance out her window of the studio on Fifth Avenue and she sees the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show coming to town. It's the beginning of a very personal project for her and one that she takes and elevates to one of her most important projects ever.
Video produced and edited by, Rebecca Wingo, University of Nebraska—Lincoln
Videography, Jeremy Goodman, Buffalo Bill Historical Center
Featuring, Michelle Delaney, Smithsonian Institution
The William F. Cody Archive
codyarchive.org
2013
Senior Digital Editor, Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University
