Happy Birthday, Gertrude Käsebier! Gertrude Käsebier, a celebrated American photographer, was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1852. She and her family moved to Colorado during the gold rush. In 1874, she married Eduard Käsebier who provided her with financial stability and a son and two daughters. Her art career was influenced by her motherhood. She studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, but quickly switched to photography. She opened a portrait studio in New York in 1897. It is evident her Pictorialist style was clearly influenced by her painting training. The Pictorialists sought to elevate the status of photography to fine art. Käsebier managed to produce art photographs, earn money, and ardently recruit women into the profession of photography. Most of her portraits celebrate the popular Victorian topic of motherhood. She exhibited her work in the New York Camera Club, the Boston Arts and Crafts Exhibition, World's Work: Magazine of the Arts and Public Affairs, and Everybody's Magazine. Her muses evolved from family, to prominent figures like Mark Twain, to farm scenes and still lifes, and ending with Native Americans. Her photographs continue to be acclaimed for their beauty and their universal themes.
In a 1913 New York Times article, Käsebier, encouraging women to take up the profession of photography, recalled what drew her to the medium: "After my babies came I determined to learn to use the brush. I wanted to hold their lovely little faces in some way that should be also my expression, so I went to an art school; two or three of them, in fact. But art is long and childhood is fleeting, I soon discovered, and the children were losing their baby faces before I learned to paint portraits, so I chose a quicker medium."