A forgotten twentieth-century photographer’s wild portraits of women in nature | Hacker News Reader

A forgotten twentieth-century photographer’s wild portraits of women in nature

newyorker.com

118 pointsprismatic14 comments

Wow, those are insanely good. “Infinitude,” 1910, in particular, looks like a painting, sort of reminds me of "Isle of the Dead" by Böcklin. It has that same eerie mood and feel. "Heart of the Storm" is a straight-up homage to old epic classicist works. I never knew old photography could be this visually striking.

This is fairly common in early photographs. I think it is partially because many early photographers were painters originally and carried the insights of that practice over to the way they took photographs, and partially because paintings were the main frame of reference of medium to emulate.

I think the early history of photography is really interesting, in that artists and philosophers were arguing about it as long ago as the middle of the 19th century.

To some it mechanised art in a good way and allowed 'mass production' - e.g. of portraits for people who couldn't afford an artist. To others this was of course a bad thing. Others liked the apparent objectivity of photography - 'the camera never lies'.

I read Susan Sontag's On Photography many years ago and would love to see an updated version that takes account of our current image-saturated world.

The composition in Infinitude reminds me strongly of Maxfield Parrish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxfield_Parrish

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Sear...

Nice (and surprising) to see pictorialist work here. I would say that her work is not forgotten but is not known by general public so well as for example Ansel Adams is in the US. Adams belonged to the opposite school of art whose many members actively opposed pictorialism.

Hacker News has such range. Hardcore engineering news from around the web but also lovely excursions like this one.

Surprises like this is why I love HN.

A book: "Anne Brigman: A Visionary in Modern Photography" (2018) Written by Ann M. Wolfe and Alexander Nemerov and Susan Ehrens and Kathleen Pyne and Heather Waldroup

can also be previewed:

https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847862870/

Does not work in private window.

https://archive.is/HuXQj

I think the images are failing to load in this one. Does the scraping take time ?

Thank you, lovely pictures!

please tag it with NSFW, so people don't get in trouble

Do people actually browse the internet at work? Like read the news, hn, reddit, etc?

You'd be surprised!

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