Page 62 - Expanded-Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 62/145
Gertrude Kasebier: Evelyn Nesbit 1902 + manipulated self-portrait (c1900).
The American-born artist-photographer, according to Steiglitz, the ‘foremost woman photographer of her time’, was 48 years old when she made this self-portrait image in 1900, combining drawing and painting with a photograph to make this unusual painterly ‘pictorialist’ self-portrait. Evelyn Nesbit (centre above) - an inspirational ‘Gibson Girl’ was an early pin-up - her celebrity largely due to pho- tography.
https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/gertrude-kasebier/portrait-of-evelyn-nesbit/
An experimental pictorialist photographer, the great Gertrude Kasebier was already in middle-age when she made this self-portrait (background above), with its heavily reworked painted back-ground. In contrast in the foreground, a portrait of Evelyn Nesbit , a contemporary beauty, artist's model and chorus girl - whose romantic scandals lead to a great celebrity, especially after her multi-millionaire husband killed her lover and long-time molester the socialite Stanford White in 1906. As a favourite model of Charles Dana Gibson - the popular illustrator and style observer - Nesbit was perhaps the prototypical Gibson Girl - an embodiment of American feminine style and beauty in the Belle Epoque.”
Other pictorialist photographers were also making aesthetic in-roads into ‘fine art’ at this time: Since Impressionism, the fine arts were no longer a coherently homogenised cultural
influence - they had splintered into a great variety of ‘isms’, celebrated in 1924 by El Lissitzky in his Kunst Ism - the Isms of Art 1924-1914. So the avant garde photographic community were being influ- enced by the visual tropes derived from Impressionism and Pointillism, Expressionism, Vorticism, Cubism, etc.