Anne Brigman was so “counterculture”

Posté par admin
mercredi 20 juillet 2005 [n° 235]

Photographs taken “in the heart of the wilds of California”

(1) “In all of my years of work with the lens (since 1906) I’ve dreamed of and loved to work with the human figure – to embody it in rocks and trees, to make it part of the elements, not apart from them, even as Edward Carpenter writes:

“How the human body bathed in the sheen
and wet, steeped in sun and air,
Moving near and nude among the elements
Matches somehow and interprets the whole of nature.
How from shoulder to foot of mountain and man
alike the lines of grace run on;
How, as the Greeks dreamed, in rock and rill
divinest forms lie shrined, or in the wild woods lurk embodied.”

Camera Craft, Vol. 33, No. 4, April 1926
The Glory of the Open – by Anne Brigman, 1926

“Anne Brigman made exquisite scratchy platinum prints of her nude self and other women posed in twisted up trees in the Sierra Mountains (2) . Anne was so “counterculture” so caught up in beliefs of “free love” and of mystical ties to nature — she was in a sense a early hippy artist. Isadora Duncan would have been her dance-world equivalent”.

Tracey Moffatt at the Dia center of arts

In 1950, Anne Brigman published a book of her poems and photographs titled “Songs of a Pagan” (3)

These lines from the poem “Cry” describe her photograph of The Dying Cedar:

Beloved Earth… I am weary of your mighty clasp.
Life Crowds… I am exhausted with the stern decree
Of your relentless, aging binding, bending grasp…
Beloved Earth…

Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

_______________

All photographs © Anne Brigman

(1) : photo Anne Brigman by Zoe Wiseman

(2) : Storm Tree

Brigman, Anne
American (b. Hawaii, 1869-1950)
DESCRIPTIVE TITLE: Storm Tree
ca. 1915 / ca. 1940, reworked from earlier negative
gelatin silver glass interpositive with film mask
9.1 x 12.0 cm.
Gift of Willard M. Nott
76:0055:0029
George Eastman House, Rochester, NY

(3) Brigman, Anne. Songs of A Pagan. Caldwell, Ohio: Caxton Printers, 1949

More photos by Anne Brigman are presented by the Joseph Bellows Gallery

Photographie

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