Gertrude Käsebier
[Photographer, b. 1852, Fort Des Moines, Iowa, (now Des Moines), d. 1934, New York.]
The key to artistic photography is to work out your own thoughts, by yourselves. Imitation leads to certain disaster. New ideas are always antagonized. Do not mind that. If a thing is good it will survive.
I am now a mother and a grandmother, and I do not recall that I have ever ignored the claims of the nomadic button and the ceaseless call for sympathy, and the greatest demand on time and patience. My children and their children have been my closest thought, but from the first days of dawning individuality, I have longed unceasingly to make pictures of people... to make likenesses that are biographies, to bring out in each photograph the essential temperament that is called, soul, humanity.
I earnestly advise women of artistic tastes to train for the unworked field of modern photography. It seems to be especially adapted to them, and the few who have entered it are meeting with gratifying and profitable success.
(1898)
There is more in art, with an apology to that much abused word, as applied to photography, than startling display lines, on mounts and signs announcing “artist Photographer,” “Artistic Photography Studio,” etc., and the lower the standard the more frantic the claim...
To accomplish artistic work, of any individual worth, nature must be seen through the medium of the artist’s intellectual emotions.
