Natural Woman

In 1929, the photographer Anne Brigman moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Long Beach, in Southern California, to be near her ailing mother. Brigman, born in Hawaii, had spent her childhood near the ocean; at age 60, she again found herself living a few blocks from the beach. The move felt like completing a circle. She’d begun her life by the sea, and it seemed she would end it there as well.

For the previous 30 years, Brigman had devoted her life to art. A pioneering photographer, she was one of the first—if not the first—women to photograph herself nude. Many of her best photographs were taken high up in the Sierra Nevada, where she juxtaposed the female form with twisted, storm-battered trees; towering granite monoliths; and stunning vistas. These arresting, often romantic images earned her acclaim and made her a member of the Photo-Secession, a movement founded by influential photographer and tastemaker Alfred Stieglitz.

But in Long Beach, Brigman’s successes faded into the past as she grappled with grief, loss, and aging. She did what many people do when confronted with complicated emotions: she turned to poetry. Although Brigman continued taking pictures, poetry became her focus for the next two decades. She produced a book of poems titled Songs of a Pagan, written in response to her photographs. In 1941, Caxton Printers in Idaho agreed to publish the book, but World War II delayed the release until 1949, the year before Brigman died. A second book, Wild Flute Songs, was never published. Although Brigman’s poems vary in quality, much like her photographs, they’re original expressions of her life. 

“She was not precious about her career,” says Alexander Nemerov, chair of the Art and Art History Department at Stanford University. “I like Brigman’s refreshing wish to almost innocently, or naively, in the manner of Huck Finn sailing on his raft, light out for the territory and try this new medium. It feels very much of a piece with what makes her photographs, her main medium, so good … she didn’t give a shit. She was just going to do this thing.”

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On June 8, 1913, the San Francisco Call asked Brigman—by then a local celebrity—when she would divorce her husband, with whom she hadn’t lived for three years. Her reply was that she saw no need for divorce. She had “absolute freedom” and felt “unhampered now that I have no fear.” She continued:

Fear is the great chain which binds women and prevents their development, and fear is the one apparently big thing which has no real foundation in life. Cast fear out of the lives of women and they can and will take their place […] as the absolute equal of man.

Brigman enjoyed the bohemian life of a “New Woman,” a 19th-century term coined by the English novelist Charles Reade to describe an independent woman. She was a successful artist living by herself in Oakland, with thriving plants, a dozen birds, and a little dog named Rory. An active member of the Bay Area’s burgeoning art scene, Brigman was friends with author Jack London, artist William Keith, and poet Charles Keeler. “To her friends, poets and artists and patrons she keeps open house, and Rory barks welcome,” reported the San Francisco Call.

But Brigman’s independence was hard won. Her upbringing was conservative and deeply religious. She was born in 1869, in the Nu’uanu Valley on Oahu (Hawaii), to a family of missionaries. Her grandfather Lorrin Andrews developed one of the first Hawaiian dictionaries to translate the Bible and later established the first newspaper in Hawaii. It was a time when white settlers brought “profound changes to the political, cultural, economic, and religious life of indigenous Polynesian peoples who had resided there for centuries,” writes art historian and curator Susan Ehrens.

Brigman—born Anne Wardrope Nott, or Annie—was the oldest of eight children. When not attending to school or family duties, she and her siblings roamed the valley, investigating the pools and rocks where spirits from Hawaiian mythology were said to live. “Don’t you remember trying, in your youth, to sit still on a haircloth sofa during long Sunday morning prayers?” Brigman later wrote. “Of the ache in your legs for flight; of the hunger for air in your nostrils; of the wild, wonderful need to stampede?” This freedom in nature left a deep impression on her, as did the Hawaiian landscape. In her poem “Lamentation,” she remembers her childhood:

The shimmer of the sun upon the sea
Glitters beneath my eyelids in a dream
Of days gone by … and to my nostrils seem
To float the perfume of the sandy lea
Where grows verbena that you brought to me […]
 
I dream with open eyes of my lost shore …

When she was 16, Brigman’s family moved to California. Not much is known about this period of her life, but at 25, she married Martin Brigman, a Danish sea captain more than 20 years her senior. They moved to Oakland, where his 200-foot boat was docked at the pier. Her family described them as “wild and free people,” and for a time, the marriage seemed to offer Brigman the liberty she craved. The couple sailed to China, Australia, and the South Pacific. In “Hunger,” Brigman recalls the “thunder of wind in sails” and the “keening of storms in ropes on high … / For the stinging spray from charging waves / And the stormy petrels skimming by.”

While on one of these trips, Brigman fell down a porthole and mangled the left side of her body, partially severing her breast. The injury, and subsequent medical treatment, scarred her for life. “She appears to have had a mastectomy that was botched and sewn back together crudely,” says art historian Kathleen Pyne. “It must have been incredibly painful and taken a long time to heal, if it did at all.”

This might have deterred other women from photographing themselves naked but not Brigman. Later, she manipulated photos to cast that side of her body in shadow, or she simply turned away from the camera. For her, nudity was an expression of the self in nature. She wanted to put the human figure “in rocks and trees,” she later wrote, “to make it part of the elements, not apart from them.” She describes this connection in “Tryst with the Wind”:

Around my feet, small, dry leaves whirl
In a dusty dance with the whispering trees …
And it’s glad I am of the wind in my hair,
And glad of its kiss on my breast and face
And its lift and swirl as I stand here bare
For my tryst with the wind
In the night
With a star.

In Songs of a Pagan, Brigman pairs this poem with a photograph of a naked woman standing beside a natural pool. She’s facing a tree growing out of the large rock that fills the background of the picture. Both tree and figure are reflected in the pool. The woman’s slender form seems dwarfed beside the long trunk.

The first handheld Kodak camera came out in 1888. It was marketed with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” Brigman started taking photographs around 1901, at age 32. She soon joined the California Camera Club and published in its magazine, Camera Craft. From the beginning, she approached photography as art—a new, and somewhat controversial, view at the time. She was a pictorialist, an avant-garde movement in which photographers manipulated pictures for a painterly, soft-focus effect.

In 1902, five of Brigman’s prints were chosen for the San Francisco Photographic Salon. The following year, her work was displayed again, and she began corresponding with Stieglitz, whose Photo-Secession group was establishing photography as a fine art.

“Stieglitz recognized the significance of Brigman’s work very early in her career,” says Ann Wolfe, curator of the Nevada Museum of Art, which recently presented the first retrospective of Brigman’s work (it will be on view at the Grey Art Gallery in New York City in 2020). “She began making photographs in 1901, 1902, and almost immediately he made her a fellow of the Photo-Secession. She was one of the few women artists, and the only artist in the West, to be a fellow. He championed her work.”

Stieglitz had previously promoted Gertrude Käsebier’s photographs of motherhood and domesticity, but his focus shifted to Brigman. He acted as her agent, submitting her work to juried competitions, placing it in galleries, and publishing it in his influential magazine, Camera Work. He also talked of giving her a solo show at his Gallery 291 in New York. 

Then, in April 1906, the great earthquake shook much of San Francisco to the ground. Although Brigman’s house was unscathed, the devastation took an emotional toll. By summer, she wanted “a change of scene after the long strain,” so she and some friends decided to explore the Sierra Nevada.

In the early 20th century, access to the mountains was difficult and required either a train trip over Donner Summit or a long stagecoach ride through the Sacramento Valley and the American River Canyon, according to Ehrens. It was considered the domain of men, as few women ventured into the higher elevations. Brigman and her friends traveled as high as 10,000 feet, camping above the tree line, where thunderstorms are frequent. She was struck by the otherworldly atmosphere of the subalpine ecosystem, with its granite outcrops, alpine lakes, and meadows scattered with boulders. It soon became the setting for her work, both in photography and in poems such as “El Cañon Grande”:

Vast, pulsing silences
Rise from the shade-riven deeps
Of purple cañons …
Dark cedars cling at breathless heights
To rocky scarp and battlement
Where morn and night flows by
In endless festival of rain and sun
And thunders chaunt their growling figures
Among the hoary peaks
Who brood aloof … serene …
Robed in canonical of violet and flame. 

In Songs from a Pagan, the poem appears beside a photograph taken from above, looking through the trees into a valley of striated mesas. The tree branch and center mesa are in shadow.

The trip was a turning point for Brigman. In the following years, she returned to the mountains many times, either alone or with friends and sisters. As she wrote for Camera Craft, “We ate, and slept with the earth in the fullest sense in this glorious grimness. Under these circumstances, through the following years, […] I slowly found my power with the camera among the junipers and the tamarack pines of the high, storm-swept altitudes.”

In her knapsack, Brigman carried two books: Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman and Towards Democracy, by the British poet Edward Carpenter. Like Whitman, Carpenter was gay. He was also a socialist and a spiritualist who promoted gender equality, sexual liberation, and a mystical connection to nature. He deeply influenced Brigman’s ideas about the freedom of nature. When she was away from the mountains, she felt a “hunger” for the release they offered: 

I wanted to go and be free. I wanted the rough granite flanks of the mountains and the sweet earth. I wanted the stacatto [sic] song of wind around rocks and juniper branches. […] I wanted to forget everything except that I was going back to heaven, back to heaven in my high boots, and trousers, and mackinaw coat. That was all I wanted.

These lines echo Towards Democracy: “FREEDOM at last! / Long sought, long prayed for—ages and ages long: / The burden to which I continually return, seated here thick-booted and obvious yet dead and buried and passed into heaven, unsearchable.”

Carpenter’s work often included “enchanted woodlands inhabited by pagan gods and spirits,” according to Pyne. At the time, Greek revivalism was influential in the Bay Area, which many called the “Athens of the West.” Brigman often used photographs to tell stories from mythology, filling her pictures with nymphs, gods, and mermaids. Her poetry expanded on the idea that California mountains were a new Olympus. In “Deep Woods,” for example, she writes, “I think I heard Pan laugh / But … / Did I? … / Or was it happy quail?” The poem appears opposite one of her few photographs featuring a male model, a nude, Pan-like figure sitting on a boulder.

Brigman was especially drawn to the trees of the Sierra Nevada. Bristlecone pines, among the oldest living things on Earth, are gnarled and twisted and grow in harsh temperatures and dry soil. The nature of these and other subalpine trees, which lived on despite the regular mauling of storms, inspired her. “I love wild trees that stand apart and stark / Beaten by wind and rain and stinging hail,” she writes in one poem. “Trees that withstand the flail / Of lightnings and the bellowing thunder’s roar … / Aloof … supreme ... unmindful of the storms.” In another poem, she writes, “I wish I were fine as a tree is fine.”

When not posing herself, Brigman enlisted her sisters and friends as models. She placed them against and around trees so they seemed to merge, thus contrasting the grotesque limbs with soft female forms. She called her models “slim, hearty, unaffected women of early maturity … toughened to wind and sun.”

Stieglitz responded to the new and startling California scenery in Brigman’s work as well as to the personal nature of her photographs. He called her “one of the very few photographers who have done any individual work”—high praise from the discerning eye that was the first to bring Matisse’s and Picasso’s paintings to the United States.

In 1909, Brigman went to New York to meet Stieglitz. The city’s frenetic energy rattled her, and she managed to find his gallery only by pretending she was on a mountain trail. Once there, she was alarmed to learn that Stieglitz viewed the nudity in her photos through the lens of Freud and Havelock Ellis, a physician and scholar who believed women artists expressed sexuality through their work. Brigman, of course, used nudity to express her connection to nature, and Stieglitz’s interpretation reportedly shocked her.

“What happens over the course of her short stay in New York is that it&’s not the camaraderie she was hoping to enjoy with the other men in the Photo-Secession,” Wolfe says. “She finds them often poring over the nude photographs, almost as though they’re sort of early erotica, and she can’t believe that her work is being interpreted that way. So it’s this kind of personal crisis.”

The solo show Stieglitz promised Brigman never materialized (he wasn’t happy with her printing technique). In 1924, he married Georgia O’Keeffe, another artist who admired Brigman. (Stieglitz promoted O’Keeffe’s abstract paintings as expressions of her sexuality, which O’Keeffe disliked.) Brigman’s work even inspired some of Stieglitz’s famous photos of O’Keeffe cocking her arms above her head in a manner reminiscent of Brigman’s models.

Although Brigman’s work continued to be exhibited and won prizes, Wolfe believes that one reason Brigman has been largely forgotten is because of Stieglitz’s shift toward O’Keeffe.

“You can watch how Stieglitz goes from Käsebier to Brigman and then to O’Keeffe,” Wolfe says. “And maybe the reason everybody knows O’Keeffe’s name but nobody knows Brigman’s name is because he’s the man who’s defining the canon of modern art at that time.”

Still, Brigman remained grateful to Stieglitz. She dedicated Songs of a Pagan to him as a “deep-hearted friend” and a “fierce but fair critic.” They corresponded until 1944, two years before Stieglitz died.

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In the 1920s, Brigman’s father, former husband, and mother all died. And when Brigman moved to Long Beach, she understood that she was unlikely to return again to the mountains. “Perhaps my feet shall never tread again / Beloved trails marked high against the sun,” she writes in “Elf-World,” a poem published beside a somber photograph of an alpine lake shining amid a landscape set in shadows.

She began taking creative writing classes taught by Helen Mathews, a local teacher later included in Brigman’s book dedication. Brigman filled notebooks with drafts of poems. She kept the typewritten versions, which she edited by hand and retyped even if she changed a single word, in a loose-leaf binder. “These notebooks are evidence of her rigorous writing and editing processes,” Ehrens notes, “in which she found joy much like she experienced in the development and manipulation of her photographic negatives and prints.”

Songs of a Pagan, a title that recalls Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” contains 38 poems laid out beside 38 photographs.Wild Flute Songs collects another 35 poems beside 35 photographs. Although Songs of a Pagan is out of print, both books are available online.

Many of Brigman’s poems address the loneliness of grief, as in “Anodyne”:

Now, though I have not you, I have the sea
With its strange beauty and its lonely wastes …
Yet, when the moonrise and the sunsets come
I long to share … like sacramental bread and wine.

In other poems, she considers the prospect of her death and asks what will come afterward. In “Cry,” she writes, “Beloved Earth … I am weary of your mighty clasp,” but, she asks, “[W]here shall I go? I have but glimmering memories / Of lives before.” The photograph Brigman picked for the poem “Barrier” features a woman’s face downturned in sorrow. Blackness frames the face, almost covering it as with a veil.

This pensive mood is also apparent in Brigman’s late photography, particularly in her “sand erosion” photographs. These abstract close-ups show the effects of water on the draining beach, a reflective view of the changing time and tide. Many of the poems echo this preoccupation with the sea as metaphor, as in “Elegie.”

Out of the south wet mists are trailing
Their weeping-rain on the ocean’s face
And the wind and the little gray waves are wailing
With the cry of the gulls and the daylight failing.
 
My heart is weary with too much crying …
I stand alone … there is no trace
Of those I loved … the day is dying …
Gray birds in the dusk are flying, flying.

When Brigman died, she left behind a rich artistic legacy that included photographs, two complete poetry manuscripts, plans for a children’s book, an unpublished memoir, and linoleum block prints, among other works. In all her work, she expressed herself as an individual and as an artist at a time when women’s voices were often dismissed or ignored. This took courage, as Professor Nemerov notes.

“I suspect [making art] was just something she had to do,” he says. “The messiness, or tripping over clichés and so on, was incidental to the sort of nobility of the achievement of what you might describe as a life lived in the name of art.”