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"Soul of the Blasted Pine," a self-portrait of Anne Brigman taken in 1908.

Anne W. Brigman (1869 - 1950) was an American photographer and one of the original members of the Photo-Secession movement in America. Her most famous images were taken between 1900 and 1920, and depict nude women in primordial, naturalistic contexts.

Brigman was born in Hawaii in 1869 and moved to California when she was sixteen. In 1894 she married a sea captain, Martin Brigman. She was trained as a painter but begain taking photos around 1902. That year, Alfred Stieglitz noticed Brigman's work and invited her to join the Photo-Secession, an elite group of pictorialist American photographers who were dedicated to transforming photography into a higher form of art. Brigman was the only Fellow of the society west of the Mississippi River,^[1] and one of the few women. Her photos were printed in three issues of Stieglitz's journal, Camera Work. She became revered by West Coast photographers and her photography influenced many of her contemporaries. Brigman died in 1950 in California.

Brigman's photographs frequently focused on the female nude, dramatically situated in natural landscapes or trees. Many of her photos were taken in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in carefully selected locations and featuring elaborately staged poses. Brigman often featured herself as the subject of her images. After shooting the photographs, she would extensively touch up the negatives with paints, pencil, or superimposition.

Brigman's deliberately counter-cultural images suggested bohemianism and female liberation. Her work challenged the establishment's cultural norms and defied convention, instead embracing pagan antiquity. The raw emotional intensity and barbaric strength of her photos contrasted with the carefully calculated and composed images of Stieglitz and other modern photographers.

• Getty Museum. Anne W. Brigman
• Oakland Museum of California. A Poetic Vision: The Photographs of Anne Brigman
• Alexander Nemerov. "Anne Brigman." Lecture: Yale University, New Haven, CT. 5 October 2006.

1. ^ Susan Ehrens, A poetic vision: the photographs of Anne Brigman (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1995), 23.