Oct 15, 2007 - Sale 2124

Sale 2124 - Lot 62

Price Realized: $ 6,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
KÄSEBIER, GERTRUDE (1852-1934)
"Corrine and Madeleine Gelshenen." Platinum print, 8x6 inches (20.3x15.2 cm.), with Käsebier's signature, in pencil, on mount recto. Circa 1910

Additional Details

Gertrude Käsebier was an early champion of photography as a form of creative expression. A founding member of the Photo-Secession, her images were featured in Camera Work's inaugural issue.

As editor of Camera Notes, in the 1890s, Alfred Stieglitz began promoting her work and organized exhibitions of her photographs in New York. In 1898, at the first Philadelphia Photographic Salon, there were 1200 entries; only 259 were selected and 10 of them were Käsebier's. A year later, her photograph, "The Manger," sold for $100--the highest price paid for a photograph at that time.

By 1901 her photographs had been exhibited in Frances Benjamin Johnston's exhibition devoted to women photographers, and also in the noted photographer F. Holland Day's School of American Photography. She was also the first woman to be elected into The Linked Ring, a "by invitation only" organization, created in 1892, that sought to make photography into the preeminent art form.