Where male frontier photographers of the time tended to convey an omniscient, assessing view of the American landscape, Brigman was interested in the sensual, the gestural, the interanimation of human beings and the natural world. In her photograph Dawn, for instance, Brigman places her nude body in the foreground of the iconic vista of Donner Lake. Her body overwhelms the sublime vastness of the scenery beyond her, even as her curves visually echo the mountains that surround the lake.
The Bubble, 1906.Photograph Courtesy Wilson Centre for Photography
In 1910, feeling artistically isolated in the Bay Area, Brigman travelled to New York City, with a plan to learn platinum printing and to visit with Alfred Stieglitz. For years, he had been planning and postponing a solo exhibition of Brigmans work. (Stieglitz praised her for being one of the very few photographers who have done any individual work, but complained that she lacked technique.) Once in New York, Brigman quickly became turned off by the harshness of the city and the atmosphere surrounding Stieglitz and his circle of male artists. Nearly all the photographs Stieglitz was exhibiting at his famous 291 Gallery at the time centered on the female nude. But, Brigman found, the men in Stieglitzs scene often belittled the subject, ogling and making ribald jokes. This, she would later write to Stieglitz, staggered her. She left New York City and never returned; her solo exhibition never happened.
Brigmans commitment to the nude was both aesthetic and philosophical; she believed it to be the greatest form for expressing, as she put it (echoing Whitman, her favorite writer), the clean, strong freedom of body and soul. In an essay published in 1926, Brigman wrote of feeling overcome, the previous summer, by a hunger for the clean, high, silent places, up near the sun and the stars. To be able to go where you want to go, to enjoy the corners of the world you most enjoyits not an ideologically neutral credo. One could argue that Brigmans photos participate in a settler fantasy of the untamed landscape, perhaps as much as those of any male photographer of her era. But its a credo that few women of Brigmans time would have dared to live by. And its one that, from our vantage now, indoors, cramped and unfree, we might realize weve taken for granted.
