Anne Brigman was a proponent of Pictorialism, the turn-of-the-20th-century international photography movement that sought to put photography on an equal footing with painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. The Pictorialists favored a soft-focus, romantic aesthetic achieved through means such as the use of special lenses, the touching up of negatives, and the manipulation of final prints. Brigman distinguished herself within this mode of art photography through her subject matter, posing female friends and family members in the wilderness of northern California, and conceiving of their figures as an extension of nature. Brigman was born in Hawaii and lived most of her life in California. Although she visited New York only once, in 1910, her photographs found an influential champion in Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited her gelatin silver prints at The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. Stieglitz also published photogravures of her compositions (including the two plates shown here) in "Camera Work", the seminal photographic journal that he edited and published between 1903 and 1917.