Artist Entry: Anne W. Brigman

I am really excited about my artist tonight. Its unfortunate I hadn't been exposed to her work before because our visions are so similar. She was not only one of the first women photographers but one of the first photographers in general to use the camera as an artistic tool creating something called "ecofeminism," according to Intimate Circles. Her images were of women in nature in dramatic poses reaching towards something, as if growing out of the tree. She manipulated her negatives by layering and disturbing their surface. The "female nude in nature" is over-saturated now but at the time it was risky and contemporary. My favorite interpretation from her images is from The Photo Book where the writer was speaking about her piece The Soul of the Blasted Pine.

"She is probably a hamadryad or Classical tree nymph who is suffering the bad fortunes of her host in the mountains of California. According to the old stories, hamadryads were tree spirits and they died when their trees decayed."

"She [Brigman] described the trees of the Sierras as 'squat giants twisted and torn with the sweep of the prevailing winds' [...] she could visualize 'the human form as a part of tree and rock rhythms.'"

I was interested in finding out what ecofeminism meant (even though I do not only portray females). According to Wikipedia, ecofeminism highlights the correlation between the oppression of women in society and oppression of nature by man. The exact definition is as follows:

Ecofeminists argue that a strong parallel exists between the oppression and subordination of women in families and society and the degradation of nature through the construction of differences into conceptual binaries and ideological hierarchies that allow a systematic, however logically unsound, justification of domination ("power-over power") by subjects classed into higher-ranking categories over objects classed into lower-ranking categories (e.g. man over woman, culture over nature, white over black.

The Soul of the Blasted Pine

I hate to say it because I always jinx myself but I think I'm getting closer now to finally being happy with my project.