Anne Nott Brigman
Today, Anne Brigman’s photographs. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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Anne Brigman was born Anne Nott in Hawaii in 1869. Her family moved to Los Gatos, California, when she was a teenager. There, she grew up and married a sea captain, Martin Brigman. She sailed the seas with him for a while. Then she quit the sea and moved to Oakland, California. One account suggests that she had a serious accident at sea. Whatever happened, that move marked the end of their marriage.
Anne Brigman, self portrait
And there Anne Brigman took up photography. We know that she used a Korona camera with four by five glass plates and a smaller Ansco camera that likely shot rolled film. And she was a quick study. We best remember Brigman for pictures she took when she lugged her cameras off to wilderness camps. Her photography in the Sierra Nevada was unforgettable.
Her subjects were far from what we see as nature photography. She was no Ansel Adams. She offered no realist vision of the American West. Much of her work wove nude figures into surreal natural backdrops. She would merge the lines of a figure with those of a broken tree. Bodies seemingly growing out of trees or rocks.
Take her photo titled Soul of the Blasted Pine: We see a broken snag of a tree backed by a dark lowering sky. But look more closely: It is half snag, half woman throwing her arm heavenward as she seems to grow out of the tree.
Soul of the Blasted Pine. Photo by Anne Brigman
Of course Brigman also did a great deal of general photography in the city. But somehow darkness creeps in. Look twice at her guitar player of Seville: He barely emerges from the shadows. Her fame grew as people were hypnotized by her eerie vision of reality. Alfred Stieglitz, then America’s most famous photographer, became aware of her work and drew her into his circle of America’s leading photographers.
I’ve asked my photographer friends what they seek as they point today’s amazing cameras. I know my own objective is no more than to catch the beauty of creatures and things, as they are. But many love photography’s capacity for capturing reality as it is not! As we might imagine it to be. Or as we had never imagined it in our wildest dreams.
It’s pretty obvious that the most compelling photos show reality in a way that gives new context and meaning. Brigman went far beyond that. She showed us some unreality – something that could never be. She made no bones about manipulating her photos. She even used a black pen to alter some of her negatives.
But then, her aim was art, never mind representation. She stole from the camera to reveal her own artistic vision. And that vision lingers and disturbs, even today.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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Some Sources:
Anne Brigman, Photographer - Yale University Press
Anne Brigman: A Visionary in Modern Photography - Nevada Museum of Art
A Pioneering Photographer, Bare in the Back Country - The New York Times
Trail-Blazing Bay Area Photographer Gets Her Due in Los Gatos Exhibition | KQED
For more on Anne Brigman in context, see J. H. Lienhard: Inventing Modern, Growing up with XRays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins, Oxford University Press, 2003, Chapter 5, Remington to Modern: Finding the Core on the Fringe.
All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
This Episode first aired October 15, 2026.