Anne Brigman's

The Bubble, 1905

27" x 24"

 original in Oakland Museum 

This image, photographed relatively early in Brigman's rapidly burgeoning career, features almost all the earmarks of her style:  the nude figure cloaked in reverie and posed in the midst of an activity which ties her to nature.  No wind-blasted tree provides a backdrop, as usual in Brigman's photographs, but a similarly gnarled clump of branches at right introduces the coarse textures Brigman like to contrast with the smoothness of her subjects' bodies.  The roof of the grotto in which the girl sets her bubble afloat - or is she retrieving it from the water? - sags and drips voluptuously.  Could the bubble signify the awakening of desire, or the fragile aspirations of love?

Hawaiian-born Anne Brigman made and exhibited photographs during the first two decades of the century.  While working with the camera she was closely associated with the style of photography which predominated then.  This "pictorial photography" made use of soft-focus techniques and is best known for highly narrative and picturesque subjects, although the pictorial photographers also did a great deal of portraiture.  Brigman was no exception.  Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she used the lush forests and the stark, windswept coastal vegetation as dramatic backdrop for her figures.  These models she would pose in artful replication of classical mythology or more general symbolical subjects.  Brigman exhibited all over the United States and Europe, was elected a fellow of the Photo-Secession, and was the only woman from the Western U.S. to show in Alfred Stieglitz's famed 291 Gallery in New York.  Failing eyesight and the waning popularity of the pictorialist approach made it hard for Brigman to continue working after the early 1920s, so she abandoned the camera professionally and began writing poetry.