Biography (Courtesy of Christian Peterson)
 
Käsebier was the most recognized women photographer around 1900 in both pictorialism and professional portraiture. She excelled at portraying aspects of womanhood, often picturing mothers and daughters together. As a founding member of the Photo-Secession, she was closely associated with Alfred Stieglitz and was the featured photographer in the first issue of Camera Work.
 
Käsebier was born Gertrude Stanton in Des Moines, Iowa, on May 18, 1852. After her father's death when she was twelve years old, her family moved east, where she lived with her grandmother in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, while her mother ran a boarding house in New York. Ten years later, she married Eduard Käsebier, with whom she had three children. At age thirty-seven, she began studying portrait painting at Pratt Institute and in the summer of 1894 chaperoned an art class to France.
 
While she had already won a prize in a photographic competition two years earlier, the medium did not fully attract her until this European trip. While there, she learned the technical aspects of photography from a chemist in Germany. Back in the States, she apprenticed herself to a professional photographer in Brooklyn to get a grasp on business practices and in 1897 opened her own portrait studio in Manhattan. She met with quick success and was soon praised by both amateurs and professionals as this country's leading female practitioner.
 
In 1898, ten of Käsebier's prints were accepted in the First Philadelphia Photographic Salon and she commenced a long relationship with the Sioux Indians from Buffalo's Bill's Wild West Show, as subjects for her camera. The next year, she served on the jury of the second Philadelphia salon, presented a solo show of portraits at the Camera Club of New York (which she soon joined), and opened a summer studio in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1900, she was elected to the Linked Ring Brotherhood in London and her work was included in the important New School of American Photography show, organized by F. Holland Day and hung in London and Paris. Her photographs were seen in major Photo-Secession exhibitions in New York, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C.
 
Between 1899 and 1902, seven photogravures by Käsebier appeared in Camera Notes, more than any photographer other than Stieglitz. Subsequently, when Stieglitz issued the first number of Camera Work in January 1903, he chose her as the featured photographer. Among her images were The Manger and Blessed Art Thou among Women, now icons for both her and pictorial photography. The magazine also included appreciative texts by fellow photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston and the art critic Charles H. Caffin. Käsebier eventually had a falling out with Stieglitz (not an uncommon occurrence for him), leading her to resign from the Photo-Secession in 1912. Until about this time, her creative photographs were seen in innumerable exhibitions and salons throughout Europe and the United States.
 
Käsebier's husband died in 1910, after which she combined her portrait studio and living space. At this time, she also started to involve herself with different photographic groups. She taught at Clarence H. White's new summer school in Maine, and served as the president of the Women's Federation of the Photographers' Association of America. In 1916, she helped found the Pictorial Photographers of America, an effort to continue the aesthetics of the Secession, and was designated its honorary vice president. The same year, she had a one-person exhibition at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.
 
In 1925, Käsebier's eyesight began to fail, and two years later she retired, though her daughter, Hermaine Turner, continued operating the studio. The last retrospective during her lifetime occurred in 1929, at the Brooklyn Institute. Gertrude Käsebier died at Hermaine's home in New York, on October 13, 1934.
 
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
 
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
 
Biography provided by Focal press
 
Opened a New York portrait studio (1897) where she created a reputation for her mother and child motifs that stressed tonality over formal compositional elements. Known as the leading woman pictorialist, she produced platinum, gum-bichromate, bromoil, and silver prints, and encouraged women to take up photographic careers. Founding member of the Photo-Secession in 1902. Stieglitz promoted her highly romantic work, reproducing it in Camera Work. Eventually, she broke contact with Stieglitz over the issue of "straight" photography, forming the Pictorial Photographers of America in 1916 with Coburn and C. White.
 
(Author: RH)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)
 
Wikipedia
 
Gertrude Käsebier (born Stanton; May 18, 1852 - October 12, 1934) was an American photographer. She was known for her images of motherhood, her portraits of Native Americans, and her promotion of photography as a career for women.