Gertrude Käsebier

PLEASE NOTE - SEE SAMPLES OF ARTWORK AFTER BIOGRAPHY SECTION

Nothing predisposed Gertrude Stanton to becoming the urban and international artist she would go on to be at the turn of the 20th century. Born on the plains of the Midwest, she admitted that she suffered from growing up in an environment that did not value aesthetics. The Stanton family prospered thanks to her father’s sawmill in Colorado until the Civil War forced them to flee to Brooklyn, New York. G. Stanton received a solid education at the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, after which she returned to live with her family. She met one of the lodgers of her mother’s boarding house, Eduard Käsebier, an immigrant from a well-connected family in Germany, whom she married in 1874. His income as a shellac importer provided enough to support Gertrude in pursuing her first vocation as a portrait painter.
In 1889, at the age of thirty-seven and with her three children almost teenagers, she enrolled in the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she studied painting for seven years in addition to practising photography on the side. By 1885 the latter medium had found its place in many homes but in the meantime, the passionate snapshot photographer that was G. Käsebier had developed further ambitions. In 1896 she had produced enough material to present her first solo exhibition at the Boston Camera Club, showing one hundred and fifty works.
Faced with her husband’s declining health and the need to secure her family’s future finances, she decided to pursue photography as a profession. At the turn of 1897 and 1898 she opened her first New York commercial portrait studio. Its immediate success allowed her to transfer the premises to Fifth Avenue in 1899.

In 1898, Käsebier watched Buffalo Bill's Wild West troupe parade past her Fifth Avenue studio in New York City, toward Madison Square Garden. Her memories of affection and respect for the Lakota people inspired her to send a letter to William "Buffalo Bill" Cody requesting permission to photograph the members of the Sioux tribe traveling with the show in her studio. Cody and Käsebier were similar in their abiding respect for Native American culture and maintained friendships with the Sioux. Cody quickly approved Käsebier's request and she began her project on Sunday morning, April 14, 1898. Käsebier's project was purely artistic and her images were not made for commercial purposes. They never were used in Buffalo Bill's Wild West program booklets or promotional posters. Käsebier took classic photographs of the Sioux while they were relaxed. Chief Iron Tail and Chief Flying Hawk were among Käsebier's most challenging and revealing portraits. Käsebier's photographs are preserved at the National Museum of American History's Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1900, Käsebier continued to gather accolades and professional praise. In the catalog for the Newark (Ohio) Photography Salon, she was called "the foremost professional photographer in the United States". In recognition of her artistic accomplishments and her stature, later that year, Käsebier was one of the first two women elected to Britain's Linked Ring (the other was British pictorialist Carine Cadby).

The next year, Charles H. Caffin published his landmark book Photography as a Fine Art and devoted an entire chapter to the work of Käsebier ("Gertrude Käsebier and the Artistic Commercial Portrait"). Due to demand for her artistic opinions in Europe, Käsebier spent most of the year in Britain and France visiting with F. Holland Day and Edward Steichen.

In 1902, Stieglitz included Käsebier as a founding member of the Photo-Secession. The following year, Stieglitz published six of her images in the first issue of Camera Work. They were accompanied by highly complementary articles by Charles Caffin and Frances Benjamin Johnston. In 1905 six more of her images were published in Camera Work, and the following year, Stieglitz presented an exhibition of Käsebier photographs (along with those of Clarence H. White) at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. Käsebier died on October 12, 1934 at the home of her daughter Hermine Turner.

A major collection of her work is held by the University of Delaware. In 1979, Käsebier was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.