Gertrude Käsebier

Gertrude Käsebier was not just a pioneer of photography—she blazed a trail for women to pursue the arts as a career. Born in Iowa, Käsebier (then Gertrude Stanton) moved with her family to Brooklyn at age 14 after her father passed away. There, on her 22nd birthday, she married a businessman and led a life she would later describe as miserable. She didn’t attend art school until she was 37 (at the Pratt Institute). She studied a variety of mediums but fell in love with photography and soon became an assistant to a portrait photographer. It wasn’t long before she was exhibiting on her own. After a couple of years of relative critical success, she found her subject: the Sioux tribe. After seeing Buffalo Bill’s troupe on FIfth Avenue, she got in touch, asking to photograph the tribe in her studio. The rest is history. In 1899, Alfred Stieglitz said that “beyond dispute” Käsebier was “the leading artistic portrait photographer of the day.”

She seems to have left three distinct legacies. Her portraiture of Native Americans helped forge their identity as a strong peoples into the American consciousness. Her depictions of motherhood, as influenced by the theories of Friedrich Fröbel, lent her work a striking sensuality. Finally, she left a wake of women photographers who were inspired to pursue the career after seeing Käsebier’s work (and, in a few cases, meeting with her).