Pictorialism in Context
Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits
Video Transcription
Gertrude Käsebier is a photographer working with a commercial portrait studio in the beginning of the turn of the century. She begins her studio in 1897, has success photographing the Sioux Indians of the Buffalo Bill Wild West in 1898, and she's also developing her professional relationships to other photographers in New York City at the time. It's a very, very vibrant photographic community and she begins her friendships with two of the most influential of those leading the new art photography movement, and that is Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. She becomes good friends with them, and that lasts for many years—more than a decade.
Stieglitz and Steichen are leading something called the Photo-Secessionist Movement and it's moving photography in a way that Europe had seen for several decades—thinking about the opportunity for photography as art. Thinking about how the exhibitions would be run, the salons of Europe and how they were run versus how things would happen in America.
So Käsebier is very much in the forefront of that and she really is the leading woman of her time amongst that group. She is seen as the foremost portraitist of her time, including taking the portraits of Steichen and Steiglitz and many of her other contemporaries. In the photography journals of the time it's written that Käsebier is an example of how she poses her sitters, how she works with her sitters, the techniques that she's able to bring to her final prints.
Her colleagues understand that she was a leading photographer, a leading pictorialist—that's what the art photographers were called at the time—in a way that we don't understand today. We don't know her name—Gertrude Käsebier—in a way that her contemporaries were highlighting her work, were seeing her be in the important exhibitions that were happening in New York City, in Philadelphia, in 1898, 1899, 1900, and beyond. And also joining the important European groups like the Linked Ring and the Royal Academy, and her receiving international status as a preeminent American portraitist.
This woman who took her role so seriously as a wife and a mother was also creating a very strong career. So much so that when Steichen and Stieglitz decide to publish a journal, they highlight her work amongst a few others, but very prominently discuss Käsebier's role as the leading portraitist in America.
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
