i thought of the eakins picture i posted here awhile back when i first saw brigman's pictures: the female version of eakin's vision. of course, that was an initial moment of recognition that gives way to differentiation & discernment. eakins was tunnel-visioned, while brigman was following some other muse. they both work for me.
here is brigman's wiki page, tho there's not much there to follow up on.
here's another site that shows more of her work.
"Anne W. Brigman, a l ate nineteenth-century pictorialist photographer, was born in Hawaii but spent most of her life in California. She used natural images combined with the female figure to create mysteriously poetic images. The Dying Cedar can be understood as a commentary on the grandeur and universality of nature—the oneness of woman and creation. More recently, the photograph has been seen as a statement of feminist principles, expressing a yearning for some sort of unattainable freedom. Brigman used cedar trees almost exclusively in her female nude images, but the reference to Daphne (the nymph pursued by Apollo who was saved by being transformed into a laurel tree) is unmistakable. Brigman was one of the first women to photograph nudes in a wilderness landscape. Her images deliberately resemble charcoal drawings, as she sought to capture the spirit of her subject rather than a faithful reproduction." - National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).
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