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Gertrude Kasebier

© Anne Douglas

"I have longed unceasingly to make pictures of people . . . to make likenesses that are biographies, to bring out in each photograph the essential personality." Gertrude Kasebier wrote those words in 1907 at the age of 55. In spite of her lifelong artistic ambitions, photography was actually Gertrude's second career, pursued after raising three children.

Gertrude Stanton was born on May 18, 1852 in Des Moines, Iowa. In 1859 her father opened a sawmill in the Colorado Territory and the family joined him there a year later. By 1864 the Stanton family moved to Brooklyn, New York. Gertrude's father died soon after, and her mother began to take in boarders to make ends meet. One boarder was Eduard Kasebier, a German importer of shellac. Eduard and Gertrude were married in 1874, on Gertrude's twenty-second birthday.

The marriage pleased Gertrude's mother. Gertrude had always been spirited and independent, and her mother believed that a husband and children would help settle her down. Gertrude never abandoned her dreams of being an artist, however, and began to study drawing and painting at the Pratt Institute in 1889, when she was 37 and her youngest child was 9. About the same time Gertrude started photographing her family, and in 1894 she traveled to Europe to study photography and painting.

In 1897 Gertrude Kasebier opened a portrait studio in New York. Her husband did not encourage her in this pursuit, believing it was a disgrace to the family. Nevertheless, Gertrude's studio was very successful and she was widely regarded as one of the leading portrait photographers of the day. She exhibited her photographs with the Philadelphia Photographic Society and became a founding member of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo Secession group. This group sought to elevate photography from its documentary nature to a fine art; by using textured papers and manipulating her negatives, Gertrude produced final prints much closer to Old Master compositions than to the photographs of many of her contemporaries.

Gertrude Kasebier photographed many celebrities of her time, including Auguste Rodin, Buffalo Bill, Booker T. Washington, and Mark Twain, but the images for which she is best known are of her family and friends and celebrate motherhood. Her photographs typically were soft and hazy, almost opalescent, and emotionally complex, portraying women as nurturing, spiritual, maternal beings.

Eduard Kasebier died in 1909 and in 1912 Gertrude resigned from the Photo Secession group. She continued to photograph, exhibit, and teach until about 1925, when her sight began to fail. When she closed her studio in 1929 she was also almost totally deaf. She died on October 13, 1934 at age 82, and was inducted posthumously into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 1979.