Hard to Reach: Anne Brigman, Mountaineering, and Modernity in California Archived version from NCDOCKS Institutional Repository http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/ Hard To Reach: Anne Brigman, Mountaineering, And Modernity In California By: Heather Waldroup No Abstract Waldroup, Heather (2014). "Hard To Reach: Anne Brigman, Mountaineering And Modernity In California" Modernism/modernity vol. 21 issue 2 pp.447-466. Open Access Journal. Version of Record Available From (www.muse.jhu.edu) Heather Waldroup is Associate Profes- sor of art history and Associate Director of the Honors College at Appalachian State University. Her research on the histories of pho- tography and collecting has been published in Women’s History Review, Journeys, Photography and Culture, and History of Photography. She is currently complet- ing a monograph on American photography and imperialism in the South Pacific. Hard to Reach: Anne Brigman, Mountaineering, and Modernity in California Heather Waldroup Where I go is wild—hard to reach, and I don’t go for Alfred Stieglitz or Frank Crownshield or Camera Work or Vanity Fair, but because there [are] things in life to be expressed in these places. Anne Brigman, 19161 In the spring of 1906, needing a change of scenery after the San Francisco earthquake, photographer Anne Brigman (1869–1950) and several companions made a trip to the Sierra Nevada Mountains.2 For several weeks they camped at an altitude of eight thousand feet, making daily excursions to higher eleva- tions for Brigman to photograph her models in the landscape. She later explained the excursion as follows: With a small group, I went to the northern Sierra to make rough camp, packing [in] by mule. We ate, and slept with the earth in the fullest sense in this glorious grimness. Under these circum- stances, through the following years, . . . I slowly found my power with the camera among the junipers and the tamarack pines of the high, storm-swept altitudes. Compact, squat giants are these trees, shaped by the winds of the centuries like wings and flames and torsolike forms, unbelievably beautiful in their rhythms.3 In subsequent years, during summer trips in the Sierras, often at altitudes above ten thousand feet, Brigman posed her models against ancient, twisted bristlecone pines, sublime vistas, and rock outcrops, manipulating both her negatives and her prints to create grainy, blurred, powerful images. modernism / modernity volume twenty one, number two, pp 447–466. © 2014 johns hopkins university press M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 448 Brigman’s work is visually compelling, and she was well-regarded by many of her contemporaries. She was elected to join Alfred Stieglitz’s photo-Secession group in 1903, and in 1906 she was named a fellow, the first and only on the west coast. Stieglitz remained a friend, correspondent, and supporter for many decades. Brigman’s individual photographs and exhibitions received favorable reviews in Bay Area and national publi- cations, and her work was purchased by art collectors at a time when photography was under-recognized as an art form.4 Brigman received the Grand prize in photography at the 1915 San Francisco panama pacific International exposition,5 and her work has been recognized by contemporary historians of photography, as well. Scholars such as Susan Ehrens and Kathleen pyne have addressed Brigman’s relationship to early twentieth-century spirituality and proto-feminist movements in the Bay Area.6 Overall, Brigman played a significant role in the development of art photography in California. One aspect of her work has yet to be addressed, however: Brigman’s relationship to the history of mountaineering, particularly as it was developing in California in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Brigman herself would more accurately be described as an avid hiker or trekker than a mountaineer, it is noteworthy that her ability to visit the Sierras was facilitated by trail-building projects, byproducts of the expansion of national parks, early conservation movements, and the develop- ment of mountaineering in California, all of which made the area more accessible to visitors. Brigman’s written accounts of her trips to the mountains are also noteworthy, since they recall those of contemporary mountaineers in tone and content. And the landscape Brigman photographed was not a generalized one, but specifically marked as Sierran: bristlecone pines, snow fields, alpine lakes, and rock outcrops all feature significantly in her works. Brigman’s work from the Sierras also underscores the strong connection between two key developments of the modern era, photography and mountaineering. Brigman’s Sierra photography can certainly be considered antimodern in its use of the pictorialist style, and her theme of liberation in nature also drew on contemporary spiritual move- ments and conservationist discourses. T. J. Jackson Lears has described antimodernism at the fin de siècle, especially in its American manifestations, as a rejection of “modern existence [in favor of] more intense forms of physical or spiritual experience.”7 Lynda Jessup has continued this discussion, noting that antimodernism “describes what is in effect a critique of the modern, . . . a longing for the types of physical or spiritual experience embodied in utopian futures and imagined pasts.”8 Certainly Brigman’s forays into the Sierras and the work she created during those journeys articulate with antimodern sentiments. Still, through her use of photography (arguably the key image- making technology of modernity), and through her relationship to mountaineering (a form of recreation rooted in modernity, albeit with an ambivalent relationship to it), Brigman’s Sierra photographs stress the strong interdependency of modernism and antimodernism. A consideration of Brigman’s work, both written and visual, within the history and practice of mountaineering gives new insight into the work of this sig- nificant California photographer, and more broadly, to the many, often contradictory manifestations of modernity at the fin de siècle. Waldroup / hard to reach 449Anne Brigman, Pictorialist Photographer Brigman’s photographic practice began around 1900. While her body of work and the photographers she later influenced are situated historically in the twentieth century, both her personal history and her stylistic roots reach back to the nineteenth. Brigman was born into a missionary family in Hawaii in 1869, and she grew up in Nu’uanu Valley on Oahu. As pyne has written, the landscape and flora of Hawaii no doubt had strong influence on Brigman, and she continued to identify as haole Hawaiian throughout her life and career (pyne, 66). Brigman began Songs of a Pagan, her book of photographs and poems, with the dedication “Lei Aloha”; she often signed her letters “Aloha Nui”; and she wrote to Stieglitz in 1912, “please give my aloha to the friends of 291.”9 With her family, for unknown reasons, Brigman moved to California as a teenager, living first in Los Gatos and later in San Francisco and Oakland. She married a sea captain, Martin Brigman, and for several years traveled the pacific with him (Ehrens, 19). Around 1906, she began the body of work for which she is best known: a series of female nudes taken in the high altitudes of the Sierras. Later in life, she moved to Long Beach, where the focus of her work shifted from mountains to ocean. Brigman’s style engaged with both modern and antimodern ideologies. Her early work drew on pictorialism, a style grounded in nineteenth-century aesthetics. pictorial- ism emerged in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century partially as a response to public debates about the nature of photography as an art form. pictorialist photographers employed soft focus, fine grain, and various techniques for toning. They manipulated both negatives and prints with scratching, blurring, and overpainting. pictorialists printed their works on fine paper, signed them, and exhibited and marketed their works as unique fine-art objects. pictorialism was heavily influenced by nineteenth- century spirituality, including theosophy, anti-industrial sentiments, and symbolism.10 Its relationship to the arts and crafts movement is evident, as well: like the artists and designers of that movement, pictorialist photographers produced carefully crafted, original fine-art objects meant to endow the viewer with a sense of aesthetic harmony.11 American photographers began working in the pictorialist style in the late-nineteenth century. Alfred Stieglitz and the photo-Secession movement became leading proponents on the east coast. Transposed to California, pictorialism was first used in art communi- ties around 1900 in the Bay Area and slightly later in Los Angeles. It became a key style practiced in California photography throughout the 1920s, and it continued into the 1940s. Both the aesthetics and the philosophies of pictorialism intersected well with the California craftsman style practiced in other art forms such as architecture and design, and pictorialism was further influenced by the tonalist movement in American paint- ing (Wilson, 3). As Ehrens explains, Brigman’s work found a natural home in the Bay Area; this artist, who also painted and acted in local theatre productions, “epitomized the staunchly independent, unconventional ‘New Woman,’ and Bay Area bohemian artist” (Ehrens, 20). Brigman’s involvement in the local artistic community included working relationships with other women photographers, including Adelaide Hanscom and Imogen Cunningham, but Brigman’s style seems to be influenced by her broader M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 450 creative interests as much as it is by the work of any other photographer. As Michael Wilson has noted, in spite of drawing on the stylistic aspects of pictorialism, Brigman’s work took these themes in a new direction: “Her pictures are of contemporary women and have a modern feel compared with the anachronistic re-creations of past ages fa- vored by [some] European pictorialists” (Wilson, 15). Brigman herself described her photographic project as “a search for simple loveliness,” a concept very much in line with craftsman philosophies. Brigman’s work was further informed by emerging, radical forms of countercultural spiritual practice in the Bay Area, which drew heavily on the proto-feminist movement and on the writings of early environmentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Invested in the concept of spirituality manifested in natural forms, Brigman referred to herself as a “pagan” and saw her photographic practice as an expression of her faith. An exhibition pamphlet from 1909 explained, “The aim of some of these prints is to express in the abstract the solemn majesty of the rocks, the weird trees, the joyous brook, in all of the work to express the spiritual through the material.”12 One work features a “hamadryad,” which Brigman defined as “a wood nymph inseparable from the tree she inhabited.”13 Scholars have also noted the ritualistic nature of her photographs, in which the female body appears to dance in harmony with the wild landscape. pyne argues, “Although she appropriated from her male colleagues the vocabulary of the female nude that made up her images, her female form, with its limbs and torso swaying this way and that, was received as a voice emanating from a woman’s hidden psyche” (pyne, 64). In Brigman’s work, women are active, empowered, and even transformed through their relationship to nature. Brig- man’s unique take on pictorialism enabled her to adapt an international style to her own needs and interests. Mountaineering and Modernity Brigman’s travels in the Sierras were significantly facilitated by the expansion of mountaineering in the western United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Although people have always climbed up, across, and within mountains—to invade and to escape invaders, to hunt and herd animals, and to perform acts of religious faith—mountaineering as a modern concept, one practiced by people of European descent, initially developed out of eighteenth-century romantic notions of nature and the sublime, influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As David Levinson and Karen Christiansen explain, mountaineering adventures in the Alps “began to be included in itineraries on the Grand Tour” at the end of the eighteenth century, following the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786.14 Similarly, in her intriguing social history of walking, Rebecca Solnit explains that “walking” as a pastime developed in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century and became a key means for the “expression of the desire for simplicity, purity, and solitude.”15 Modern mountaineering took a recreational turn in the mid-nineteenth century, developing as a “distinct activ- Waldroup / hard to reach 451ity”– that is, climbing for the sake of climbing.16 During this period, mountaineering transformed from an opportunity for the bourgeois subject to experience the sublime to a form of athletic recreation, with a focus on first ascents and with “patriotism, militarism, and Empire” as key themes.17 In 1857, the first alpine club was founded in London, but mountaineering quickly became a global undertaking, with many first ascents outside the Alps occurring at the fin de siècle (Mt. Cook in 1895; Aconcagua in 1897; Mt. McKinley in 1913). As many scholars have noted, mountaineering is closely tied to modernity and to nineteenth-century technologies of leisure.18 peter Hansen has noted that mountain- eering’s heyday in the nineteenth century was a result of the rise of the middle class and its increased interest in outdoor sports, a form of “actively constructed . . . asser- tive masculinity,” although many women were active in mountaineering.19 Ellis has further stressed mountaineering’s neoimperialist aspects.20 In addition, danger and its outcomes—either the triumph over danger or tragedy of succumbing to it—was a key theme in mountaineering. A 1902 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica defines mountaineering as “the art of moving about safely in mountain regions, avoiding the dangers incidental to them and attaining high points difficult of access,” and it notes that dangers to participants include falling rocks, falling from rocks, falling ice, and weather (“being blown from exposed positions to destruction”).21 While it was devel- oping as a form of masculinist adventure, by the late-nineteenth century the global practice of mountaineering was guided by a modern sense of increased movement in the landscape for the purpose of recreation, with danger assuaged by technology, enabling the mountaineer to reach the summit.22 In the U.S., mountaineering as an activity practiced by white settlers parallels and perhaps even predates the development of mountaineering in Europe. (In a catalog of American ascents before 1860, William Bueler begrudgingly acknowledges that there were “Indian ascents” prior to the beginning of Euroamerican mountaineering in the U.S., but he goes on to dismiss these as primarily aimed at a “better survey [of] the terrain,” acts incomparable with the acts of physical sport that characterized Euro- American mountaineering.23) The first Euro-American summit of Mt. Washington, New Hampshire, was recorded in 1642, although other key peaks on the east coast were explored and climbed in the eighteenth century, such as Roan and Grandfather Mountains in North Carolina in 1795.24 The expansion of mountaineering to western states also parallels the territorial expansion of the U.S. nation-state: key fourteeners such as pike’s peak and Mt. Shasta were not successfully climbed by Euro-Americans until the mid-nineteenth century. Mountaineering in the U.S. found its favorite playground in the western states, and the development of western tourism around mountainous national parks such as Yo- semite, Yellowstone, and Glacier certainly suggested the possibility of both leisure and mountaineering for tourists from the east. Marguerite Shaffer’s significant research has demonstrated these close ties between the development of western tourism, post-Civil- War American bourgeois identity, and the virtues of proximity to “unspoiled” nature. She traces the continual development of western tourism in the second half of the M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 452 nineteenth century to the emergence of the U.S. as a modern, industrial nation-state in the post-Civil-War era—“Like brand-name goods, mail-order catalogs, department stores, and mass-circulation magazines, western tourism . . . imbued the emerging nation with form and substance”—and she writes that a “truly national tourism devel- oped” around western natural wonders upon the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869: “In this way tourism reshaped the built environment of the United States and transformed the symbolic value of American landscape and, in the process, influenced the way in which people defined and identified themselves as ‘Americans.’”25 She describes this phenomenon as “national tourism,” a mode of traveling the country that departed significantly from earlier nineteenth-century manifestations of travel and tourism: “National tourism extended from and depended on the infrastructure of the modern nation-state.”26 I would add that the extension of the American frontier to the pacific Ocean in 1848, which made it possible to travel from one North American coast to the other without leaving the U.S., strongly embedded the concept of national tourism in more widespread expressions of American nationalism. The Sierra Nevada, and Yosemite National park in particular, became many things to the U.S., including a locus for the intersection of mountaineering philosophy, rec- reational trail-building, and conservation.27 Trails are vectors of history: hunters, trad- ers, travelers, and pilgrims following similar routes for many centuries inscribe their footsteps into the land, creating paths for later voyagers to follow across plains and over passes. Indeed, the history of trails in the Sierras is deeply tied with the history of California: the land was traversed for millennia by indigenous travelers and trad- ers, who were joined by non-indigenous explorers, fur traders, and later by gold-rush hopefuls. Beginning in the 1860s, mountaineers and explorers such as Josiah Whitney, Clarence King, and John Muir traced these routes further, mapping the region and including journeys to the tops of peaks. Not all of these groups followed the same paths; as Thomas Howard notes in his study of road-building in California, different modes of transportation (foot travel, mule team, stagecoach, and later railroads) resulted in following and even creating very different overland routes.28 Still, all of these many parties, moving through and across California for wildly different reasons, marked their steps into the landscape. The concept of building trails specifically for the purpose of recreation—for moun- taineering and trekking in particular—is a more recent development. In the Sierras, trails built solely for recreation were created in the mid-nineteenth century around increased tourism into Yosemite Valley and the surrounding areas. In 1855, Milton and Houston Mann developed a toll trail into Yosemite Valley, utilizing pre-existing routes, including indigenous trails, as much as possible.29 The Coulterville Free Trail was built in 1856 by residents of Coulterville into the Valley; this is one of the first recorded in the area that “did not benefit . . . from any previous existing Indian trail.”30 In ad- dition, trails to summits, for the purpose of climbing, were developed in the period. For example, the Mt. Whitney Trail was purpose-built by residents of Lone pine in 1904 to enable scientific inquiry from the Whitney peak—and of course the journeys of many since who have desired to summit the highest peak in the lower 48 states.31 Waldroup / hard to reach 453Tourism in the Sierras, and especially in Yosemite, has a complex and contentious history, further tying it with modernity’s imperialism. Scholars have clearly established that native populations were forcibly removed and that traces of native civilization (including cultivation and controlled burning) were erased by agents of the U.S. govern- ment, creating the suggestion of an empty, pristine wilderness and opening the valley for bourgeois tourism.32 Sears argues that Yosemite was “appropriated and produced for an audience hungry for national icons and for places which symbolized the exotic wonder of a region just beginning to be known” (Sears, 123). He further explains that tourism in western states initially drew on themes from American tourism in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, especially themes around natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with American tourism developing as a “mythology of unusual things to see” (Sears, 3). Finally, he stresses that photography, particularly stereographic photography, played a key role in marketing western tourist sites to middle-class audiences (Sears, 123). Richard Grusin develops this idea further, arguing that “American national identity has always been inseparable from nature” and that the preservation of natural spaces is intrinsically tied up with this identity (Grusin, 1). Thus, although Brigman would be more accurately described as a hiker (as noted previously), she made use of trails that had been mapped and occasion- ally even created as part of modernity’s complex relationship to nature, characterized by the desires both to capture and control nature and to experience it recreationally. Since late-nineteenth-century discourses about nature intersect with antimodern sentiments, mountaineering also demonstrates an ambivalent relationship with the key tropes of modernity. An alternate voice in the scholarship on mountaineering comes from the work of Sherry Ortner, who argues that mountaineering is a “countermodern discourse” (Ortner, 39). She explains, “The point of climbing is to find something that one cannot find in modern life, that indeed has been lost in modern life” (Ortner, 38). For her, mountaineering’s spiritual engagement contrasts with modernity’s secularism, with “the crass materialism and pragmatism of modern life”; mountaineering offers an implicit critique of modern life through its rejection of civilization in favor of the wilderness (Ortner, 37). Her position is compelling, and she makes a strong case for the reflective, thrilling experience of mountaineering as opposed to the vulgar, boring routine of modern industrial (and postindustrial) life. Her more developed discussion of Sherpa-climber relations in the Himalayas serves to underscore the antimodern (and undeniably primitivist) desires of European mountaineers. Still, mountaineering depends on the modern subject for its existence. Key aspects of mountaineering are undoubtedly modern. The celebration of the individual, the desire for the panoptic view from the peak, and especially the trail-building projects that seek to map the wilderness and structure the movement of the bourgeois subject through it—all these are firmly enmeshed in discourses of modernity. The emphasis on technology in mountaineering—the development of gear and equipment both to ease the journey and to preserve the safety of the mountaineer—also points to its roots in modernity. However, Ortner’s argument is not incommensurate with other scholarship on moun- taineering: her research instead suggests that, like Brigman’s work, the relationship between mountaineering and modernity is ambivalent and complex. M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 454 Anne Brigman and California Mountaineering The Sierras are a place of extremes. One begins in a desert climate; one then travels through multiple ecosystems, including lush evergreen forest and meadow, to emerge above the tree line to rock-covered peaks. Over the course of twenty-four hours, tem- peratures may vary from baking hot to well below freezing. Although valleys are dry, thunderstorms hover over peaks on a near-daily basis. The mountains are blanketed in many feet of snow during winter, and even during the height of summer (which is when Brigman spent her time there), large fields of snow remain at high elevations. As noted previously, Brigman camped at an altitude of around eight thousand feet, but she made multiple excursions up to ten thousand feet. The highest peaks in the region are in the thirteen- to fourteen-thousand-foot range, with the tallest, Mt. Whitney, reaching 14,505 feet.33 While Brigman did not scale any of the higher peaks, even at an elevation of ten thousand feet one has the sense of being in a transformed place. Ancient bristlecone pines, often several thousand years old and shaped by wind and weather, boulder-strewn meadows populated by marmots and pikas, and alpine lakes are all otherworldly. The aesthetics of Brigman’s photographs—both those she self-consciously produced as art, and her more casual work recording her treks—and the experiences she recorded in her writings speak to her strong connections with alpinist culture. For Brigman, her time in the Sierras placed her outside her quotidian existence, which included frequent hikes in the Oakland Hills that were enjoyable but did not afford views of undeveloped land in the same way that the Sierras did. That existence is revealed in a photograph of the photographer posed in a tree, with a house visible in the valley behind her. Its caption reads, “Scarcely a Sunday thru the past year has been missed from the trail. It gives back a sanity and peace and a new hold on the good life that is ours for the taking if we are only wise enough to know how” (figure 1).34 The low, tree-covered peaks in this image recall those close to home, such as the Oakland Hills or possibly the Santa Cruz Mountains, and her clothing, hat, and boots suggest that she is out for a Sunday stroll. During her time in the Sierras, however, Brigman attempted rougher terrain. As a recreational hiker, Brigman was likely not experienced in overland navigation; she would have relied on clearly marked trails as she explored the surrounding landscape. She also did not appear to be interested in hiking solely for the purpose of reaching peaks (“peakbagging”). Instead, Brigman appears to have been primarily interested in exploring the landscape in the general area of her camp, for recreation, for spiritual and personal development, and for her photographic prac- tice. As Ehrens explains, during Brigman’s Sierra adventures, “photography became her medium for achieving a mystical union with nature, a ritual that allowed her to create and alter her own world” (Ehrens, 23–24). The previous fifty-plus years of Anglo exploration, mountaineering, and trailbuilding in the region facilitated her journeys and created a spiritualist paradigm for the experience of alpine locations. Within the context of modernity, mountains were specific peaks to be ascended, us- ing ever-developing mountaineering technology (gear, climbing techniques) to achieve previously unreachable heights. In various writings, including essays and letters, Brig- Waldroup / hard to reach 455 ▲ Fig. 1. Photographer unknown, portrait of Anne Brigman, c. 1912. Gelatin silver print. Anne Brigman Papers, Stieglitz/O’Keefe Archive, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 380. Reproduced with permission of the Beinecke Library. ▲ Fig. 2. Brigman (far right) with her sister, a friend, and their dog, c. 1909. Gelatin silver print. Anne Brigman Papers, Stieglitz/ O’Keefe Archive, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 380. Reproduced with permis- sion of the Beinecke Library. M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 456 man describes her treks among the manzanita, juniper, and sage looking for shooting sites, and stresses that specific places held considerable influence over both her psyche and in the production of particular artworks. Her knowledge of the Sierran landscape also indicates a keen understanding of the region’s topography. In a poem entitled “To a Snow-Line Tree,” and in various photographic works, she addresses the high altitude, specifically the experience of being above the tree line. She also frequently notes specific altitudes, as written on the verso of a photo of Brigman, her sister, a friend, and their dog standing in a snow field at an altitude of ten thousand feet (figure 2). In a postcard from Glen Alpine (probably the town of Glen Alpine Springs, near Lake Tahoe), Brigman wrote, “We’ve left our three weeks of glorious camping today and have come down to 6,800 [feet] for a couple of days before dropping to nearly sea level in Oakland. I’ve meant to write you in our high camp (8,000).” 35 Finally, as she notes in an essay for Camera Craft, Brigman explained the more universal emotional experience produced through exposure to the rugged Sierra landscape: “Though I use Sierra trees and crags and thunderstorms, they . . . hold, in pictorial form, stories of the deep emotions and struggles or joys of the human soul in the form of allegory.” 36 Like other modern mountaineers, Brigman describes her experiences in the Sierras using specific descriptors that mark her adventures at particular altitudes and locations. Brigman’s writings also recall the adventurous language of many mountaineers’ memoirs. As Hansen explains, mountaineers used “language of exploration and ad- venture” to describe their journeys.37 In addition to the spiritual themes of Brigman’s writing, linking her to Muir and others, the sense of adventure—of freedom in the wilderness—is central to Brigman’s writings from the Sierras. In one letter she noted, “Late in July I made up my mind that what ailed me was hunger—hunger for the clean, high, silent places, up near the sun and stars.”38 She packed her gear, including Leaves of Grass and Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy, and chose a smaller portable film camera, as opposed to her four-by-five inch view camera. She explained, “I wanted to forget everything except that I was going back to heaven, back to heaven in my high boots, and trousers, and mackinaw coat. That was all I wanted.”39 Further, a sense of self-reliance on the part of both Brigman and the women who accompanied her is woven throughout her writings on the Sierras. In her unpublished foreword to an early version of Songs of A Pagan, Brigman wrote: “The few figures I have used through the years of the mountain series were slim, hearty, unaffected women of early maturity, living a hardy out-of-door life in high boots and jeans, toughened to wind and sun . . . cooking for weeks over a camp-fire with wood from the forest around us . . . and carrying water from the icy lake at our feet . . . bearing and forbearing to the utmost.”40 Brigman’s adventures also coincided with a key period in California history: the emergence of the conservation movement, spearheaded by John Muir and influenced by the writings of Edward Carpenter, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. The Sierras were a focus both of land conservation politics and of Muir’s environmental spiritual- ism, in which Yosemite Valley in particular served as “a kind of natural cathedral.”41 Departing somewhat from mountaineering’s modernist focus on the bourgeois subject, Muir’s experience in the mountains reached back to an earlier, arguably more romantic Waldroup / hard to reach 457understanding of the alpine experience as a locus of spiritual growth and contemplation. As Michael Branch explains, one example of this romantic departure is Muir’s narrative structure in My First Summer in the Sierras, which represents Muir’s transition from lowlands to peaks as a spiritual journey, away from the corrupt civilized world and toward the purity of the wilderness.42 Guided by Muir, California alpinism developed along distinctly spiritualist lines. In this antimodern paradigm, the rugged wilderness existed in opposition to civilization; it was a place to gain access to spiritual purity. The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 for “recreational, educational, and conservationist” purposes, but with Muir’s spiritualist philosophies as a contextual framework. While it is uncertain if Brigman was a member of the Sierra Club, she certainly would have been familiar both with its policies and with its projects, and the popularity of the Club produced an audience that would have been receptive to Brigman’s works.43 In one example of Brigman’s connection with both the philosophical and pragmatic manifestations of California alpinism, Brigman wrote the following of a visit to Yosemite Valley in July 1914: Those were marvelous days in the corduroy suit and tramping boots. Waterfalls, roaring streams and rivers—granite rocks towering. . . . After hours of hot, patient climbing up zigzag trails the valley lay 3,000 feet below—and peak after peak rose in the distance like waves. It was good to be alive in those bare sunkissed places—to be hot and thirsty and panting with exertion—to look down the long trail, across great shoulders of granite—and realize how truly strong you were and how mighty a thing is willpower. To lift, lift step after step until what had been wished for was accomplished. I can’t begin to tell of the majesty of the place—it is too big and solemn. I was up at four o’clock, the night a party of us climbed to Glacier point, 3,000 feet above the valley.44 Brigman probably reached Glacier point via the Four Mile Trail, a switchbacked (“zigzag”) trail first constructed in the 1870s for Yosemite visitors, following the path of many others before and since who have trekked up this steep incline to experience the view from the top. This quotation further develops an aspect of Brigman’s relation- ship to the area that particularly intersects with mountaineering: while she stresses the thrill of achieving a particular location (the summit of Glacier point, overlooking Yosemite Valley), records her elevation above the valley for the reader’s edification, and demonstrates her physical strength and personal willpower, she also notes the profound emotional-spiritual experience of achieving the summit, of experiencing the “big and solemn,” sublime view from the overlook. Both in letters to friends and colleagues and in several published essays, Brigman’s writings from the region demonstrate antimodern and spiritualist tendencies, recalling contemporary works by Muir and others in both theme and content. Brigman certainly was familiar with Walt Whitman and quotes from Leaves of Grass in her essay “The Glory of the Open” and elsewhere. It is uncertain whether or not Brigman read relevant California literature, such as the writings of Muir and King; she does not quote them directly in any of the documents consulted by this researcher. Still, although she does not specifically mention Muir, Brigman must have been familiar with his works if not M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 458 with the man himself: they were being published as collections of essays in the years in which Brigman was actively visiting the Sierras. Not only was Muir a prolific author, but he and Brigman traveled in the same bohemian social sphere in the Bay Area, and they espoused parallel ideas about the relationships between spirituality and nature. Brigman did not, apparently, join any of the Sierra Club’s “High Trips”—organized camping and hiking trips—in the California wilderness (including Yosemite), but her own forays into the area combined packing in by mule to a base camp and conducting day hikes similar to the Sierra Club’s structured outings.45 The themes found in Muir’s writings were echoed in Brigman’s own. For example, in an essay titled “Awareness,” Brigman wrote, “One day during the gathering of a thunderstorm when the air was hot and still and a strange yellow light was over everything, something happened almost too deep for me to be able to relate. New dimensions revealed themselves in the visualization of the human form as a part of tree and rock rhythms and I turned full force to the medium at hand and the be- loved Thing gave to me a power and abandon that I could not have had otherwise.”46 Similarly, Muir writes of being profoundly drawn to the region, even when viewing it from afar. When viewing peaks from the valley where he was working a flock of sheep, he explains, “Through a meadow opening in the pine woods I see snowy peaks about the headwaters of the Merced above Yosemite. How near they seem and how clear their outlines on the blue air. . . . How consuming strong the invitation they extend!”47 Certainly Muir is not “only” a mountaineer, but also a pioneer of environmental and conservation movements in California and the American west more broadly, yet like Brigman, he had a strong spiritualist relationship to the landscape and saw his experi- ences in the mountains not only as a form of recreation but also as a way to achieve spiritual depth and experience. In addition to the experiences recorded in her various writings, the aesthetics of Brigman’s works from the Sierras engage with both modern and antimodern themes. Brigman certainly follows a history of Euro-American landscape photographers in the west, such as Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton Watkins, but her employment of pictorialism differentiates her work from theirs.48 The photographs produced out of Brigman’s explorations both represent the Sierras as a specific place—she was in- vested in capturing key details of the landscape—and operate as an analog for more universal spiritual experiences to be had in the landscape. This concept manifests in both her casual snapshots and her heavily manipulated pictorialist compositions. In one example, Brigman stresses that being in a particular location and experiencing the forceful weather patterns of the Sierras led to the production of her 1925 photograph Invictus (figure 3): “There, in this high, lone place . . . between hail showers and rac- ing clouds and glorious sunlight, the film of the print Invictus came to birth.”49 In this image, Brigman’s compelling composition captures the solidity and grandeur of the Sierran landscape: the powerful vertical form of the tree, rising upward and outward, enveloping the body of the woman standing within it, contrasts with the sloping hori- zon line, which is balanced by a weighty boulder in the background. The wide range of tones in the image, from the strong shadows beneath the tree to the clouds in the Waldroup / hard to reach 459 ▲ Fig. 3. Anne Brigman, Invictus, 1925. Gelatin silver print. Scripps College, Gift of C. Jane Hurley Wilson and Michael G. Wilson, 2008. Reproduced with permission of the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery. ▲ Fig. 4. Anne Brigman, Harlequin, undated. Gelatin silver print glued into album. Anne Brigman Papers, Stieglitz/ O’Keefe Archive, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 380. Reproduced with permission of the Beinecke Library. M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 460 sky, add greater depth and drama to the image. Finally, the nude female figure seems both to merge with and to rise up from the tree itself. Brigman’s description of the storm, suggested by the darkening sky and deepening shadows, only adds to the richly sublime aesthetics of the work. In the undated print Harlequin (figure 4), the viewer is presented with the tree itself, in strong reclined profile, reaching out towards the sky and peaks in the background. At this stage of her career, Brigman made relatively few pure landscapes, and certainly this work points towards the impact her work would have on mid-twentieth-century landscape photographers such as Edward Weston. This study also points to her inter- est in the agency contained within elements of nature itself: nature is not merely the object, but the active subject of her work. Like the rhythm contained in the trees and rocks that Brigman describes elsewhere, the tree trunk in Harlequin appears to undulate with a living energy. The graininess of her pictorialist style and her weighted composition creates an ambiguous form, in which the distinction between the tree and its surrounding landscape of sky and mountains is not entirely apparent. Finally, in her undated piece Sierra Landscape (figure 5), Brigman moves away from her typical style of ascribing mythical or spiritualist titles to her works and identifies her subject—a powerful tree and an alpine lake—as one located in the Sierra Nevada. Unlike the work of her male predecessors intent on ostensibly objective documentation, Brigman ▲ Fig. 5. Anne Brigman, Sierra Landscape, undated. Gelatin silver print glued into album. Anne Brigman Papers, Stieglitz/O’Keefe Archive, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 380. Reproduced with permission of the Beinecke Library. Waldroup / hard to reach 461purposefully blurs and smears her image, producing a unique Sierran landscape with the intention of generating a rich emotional-spiritual response that mirrors her own experiences in the wilderness. Brigman’s casual photos taken in the Sierras depart somewhat from the spiritualist themes of her art photography, engaging more closely with the adventurous tropes of modern mountaineering. Brigman’s formal artistic works draw on motifs of female liberation, as pyne has cogently argued, and this concept of the liberated woman—in this case, a sporty toughness and rugged affinity for the outdoors—also comes through in her casual snapshots from the Sierras. While Brigman used models for her formal artistic works, these casual photos of Brigman herself are integral for understanding her experience of the mountain landscape. First, like many women mountaineers of the period, Brigman is continually shown wearing wool knickers rather than skirts, demonstrating freedom of movement. pants were becoming somewhat more popular for women in the early twentieth century, at least for recreational activities, and as Ann Colley has noted, women mountaineers since the late-nineteenth century often wore knickerbockers while climbing, either on their own or in combination with a matching skirt that could be taken on and off as needed, without being considered unfeminine.50 In the photograph of Brigman with her sister, friend, and their dog in a snow field (figure 2), Brigman’s sister remains in a dress while Brigman wears knickers, thus presenting herself as the true adventurer of the group. ▲ Fig. 6. Brigman on Castle Peak, c. 1909. Gelatin silver print. Anne Brigman Papers, Beinecke Library, Stieglitz/O’Keefe Archive, YCAL MSS 380. Reproduced with permission of the Beinecke Library. M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 462 A series of solitary photos of Brigman on Castle peak (9,109 feet) further demon- strates her self-presentation as lone explorer. Brigman may or may not have climbed to the summit; nevertheless, these two photographs are framed to present Brigman in heroic poses: in one instance, with her hat in hand, waving in the wind; in the other, standing on a boulder, silhouetted against the Sierra sky, as if on a high, steep preci- pice (figure 6). More overt manipulation is evident in another image, the final print of which ostensibly shows Brigman traversing an overhung cliff (figure 7). While the interpositive version demonstrates manipulation—particularly that the overhang was added through scratching and painting directly on the negative—the final print appears to be of Brigman negotiating a dangerous corner of a cliff face.51 Finally, in all of these images, Brigman’s wool attire, knickers, and sturdy shoes mark her as a capable trekker, prepared for her adventures in the wilderness. As is attested even by the contemporary ▲ Fig. 7. Brigman “traversing” a cliff in the Sierras, c. 1909. Gelatin silver print. Anne Brigman Papers, Stieglitz/O’Keefe Archive, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 380. Reproduced with permission of the Beinecke Library. Waldroup / hard to reach 463popularity of patagonia’s Merino wool line and by wool-focused companies such as Icebreaker and Ibex, wool has often been marketed as the “new” high-tech fabric for outdoor gear, marketed as “natural,” wicking, and non-“stinky.”52 In these photos of Brigman herself, one of which was included in the preliminary pages to the published version of Songs of a Pagan (figure 7), the photographer presents herself as able ad- venturess in the mountains, both spiritually aware and powerfully physically active. Mountaineering and Photography: Modern and Antimodern photography is arguably the most modern of modernity’s image-making technolo- gies, produced out of the primacy granted to vision during the enlightenment and out of industrialism’s fetishization of the machine, with the photographer nevertheless remaining the active subject of the gaze, in control of the image produced. photogra- phy’s relationship to mountaineering is both pragmatic and ontological. It played a key documentary role in mountaineering, particularly as evidence of first ascents. In the U.S., the photography of Timothy O’Sullivan, Watkins’s mammoth plate photography, and stereographic views by many photographers mapped California for middle-class audiences in the east, making the west knowable to these viewers and enabling them to travel vicariously to the new American Eden. Similarly, mountaineering is a highly visual endeavor: even before the advent of photography, the experience of summiting a peak and obtaining the panoptic view it afforded was of key interest, with the moun- taineer as active locus of the gaze. Both photography and mountaineering articulate with antimodernism in significant ways, yet both are deeply ingrained in modernist discourses, particularly around technology and the centrality of the bourgeois subject. Intriguingly, after relocating to Southern California, Brigman’s photographic work would become overtly modernist in style, with flat planes, abstract close-ups, lack of toning in her silver prints, and clear focus recalling the work of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and other midcentury California photographers. The archival record on Brigman is deep and needs continual reading. In particular, her relationship to the burgeoning environmental movement in California and her potential knowledge of John Muir’s work are projects that invite further consideration. My goal here has been to acknowledge the multiple influences on Brigman and the many worlds her work inhabited. By situating Brigman’s work within the history of mountaineering and exam- ining her relationship to antimodernist discourses, I have attempted to enable further understanding of the multiple influences on her work, while stressing the ambivalent yet mutually dependent relationship between antimodernism and modernity. I finish here with Brigman’s own words. In a letter of 4 July 1917, she wrote, “Am off to camp for 6 weeks. It’s great ‘to eat and sleep with the earth.’”53 She then departed the Bay Area for a glorious summer in the mountains. M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 464 Notes 1. Letter from Anne Brigman to Frank Crownshield of Vanity Fair, 6 October 1916. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, YCAL MSS 85, series 1, box 8, folder 171. 2. Anne Brigman, typescript of foreword to unpublished version of Songs of a Pagan. Anne Brig- man papers, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 380, box 2, n.p. 3. Brigman, typescript of foreword, n.p. 4. See “Local Art Bought by Miss Harriman: Two Lens Studies of Mrs. Brigman added to Notable Collection,” San Francisco Call, 8 August 1911, 8. Many Bay Area newspapers praised Brigman’s work; for just one example, see “New Trail in Art Blazed by Woman: Oakland ‘pioneer’ Changes photography from Mechanical process to Spiritual Expression,” San Francisco Examiner, December 1924 (specific date unknown), 20; clipping located in the Anne Brigman papers, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 380, box 5. Brigman’s work was also mentioned positively in an announcement of an upcoming exhibition in Brooklyn; see “Institute’s Department of photography presents an April Exhibit of California Studies by Ann [sic] Brigman,” Bulletin of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, 2 April 1932; pamphlet located in Anne Brigman papers, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 380, box 5. For an example of a posi- tive critique of Brigman’s work that received national circulation, see “Works of Nature and Works of Art Blended in the California Camera Studies of Anne Brigman,” Vanity Fair 6, no. 4 (1916): 50–52. 5. Letter from Brigman to Crownshield (see note one). 6. Susan Ehrens, A Poetic Vision: The Photographs of Anne Brigman (Santa Barbara: Santa Bar- bara Museum of Art, 1995); hereafter cited in the text as “Ehrens.” Kathleen pyne, “Response: On Feminine phantoms: Mother, Child, and Woman-Child,” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (2006): 44–61. Kathleen pyne, Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keefe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California press, 2007); hereafter cited in the text as “pyne.” I thank Susan Ehrens for her generosity in pointing me to several key primary sources on Brigman. 7. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: pantheon, 1981), xiii. 8. Lynda Jessup, “Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: An Introduction,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto press, 2001), 4. 9. Anne Brigman, Songs of a Pagan (Caldwell, ID: Caxton printers, 1949). Letter from Brigman to Stieglitz, December 1912, Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 85, series 1, box 8, folder 170. 10. See Alison Nordström and David Wooters, “Crafting the Art of the photograph,” in Truth Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845–1945, ed. Thomas padon (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 2008). 11. For a discussion of the relationship between pictorialism and the arts and crafts movement, see Christian peterson, “American Arts and Crafts: The photograph Beautiful, 1895–1915,” History of Photography 16, no. 3 (1992): 189–233. See also Michael Wilson, “Northern California: The Heart of the Storm,” in Pictorialism in California: Photographs 1900–1940, eds. Michael G. Wilson and Dennis Reed (Los Angeles: J. paul Getty Museum and the Huntington Library, 1994), 1–22; hereafter cited in the text as “Wilson.” Ehrens discusses this relationship, as well (Ehrens, 20), and pyne discusses Brigman’s own interest in the arts and crafts movement (pyne, 67). 12. No author, pamphlet from exhibition with print list, 6–16 November, year unknown (probably 1909). Anne Brigman papers, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 380, box 5. 13. Brigman, Songs of a Pagan, 89. 14. David Levinsen and Karen Christiansen, “Mountain Climbing,” in The Encyclopedia of World Sport: From Ancient Times to the Present, vol. 2 (Oxford: ABC-Clio, 1996), 659. 15. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Viking, 2000), 85. 16. Levinsen and Christiansen, “Mountain Climbing,” 659. 17. Levinsen and Christiansen, “Mountain Climbing,” 659. 18. See Kerwin Lee Klein, “A Vertical World: The Eastern Alps and Modern Mountaineering,” Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 4 (2011): 519–48. Waldroup / hard to reach 46519. peter H. Hansen, “Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain,” Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (1995): 304. 20. Reuben J. Ellis, Vertical Margins: Mountaineering and the Landscapes of Neoimperialism (Madison: University of Wisconsin press, 2001). 21. “Mountaineering,” Encyclopedia Brittanica, 10th ed., vol. 31 (Edinburgh and London: Adam and Charles Black, 1902): 22–24. 22. As several insightful histories of women and mountaineering have demonstrated, such mascu- linist adventure was not always masculine. For a few examples, see Bill Birkett, Women Climbing: 200 Years of Achievement (Seattle and London: Mountaineers), 1990; David Mazel, ed., Mountaineering Women: Stories by Early Climbers (College Station: Texas A&M University press, 1994); Rebecca Brown, Women on High: Pioneers of Mountaineering (Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 2002); Karen Routledge, “Being a Girl Without Being a Girl: Gender and Mountaineering on Mount Waddington, 1926–36,” BC Studies 141 (2004): 31–58; Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver, Fallen Giants: a History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (New Haven: Yale University press, 2008); and Ann Colley, Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). For an extraordinary study of the relationships between mountaineering and gender more broadly, see Sherry Ortner, Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering (princeton, NJ: princeton University press, 1999); hereafter cited in the text as “Ortner.” 23. William Bueler, “American Ascents Before 1860,” Appalachia 40, no. 8 (1975): 102. I thank Amauri Serrano for making this article available to me. 24. Bueler, “American Ascents,” 103. 25. Marguerite Shaffer, “Negotiating National Identity: Western Tourism and ‘See America First,’” in Reopening the American West, ed. Hal K. Rothman (Tucson: University of Arizona press, 1998), 123. 26. Marguerite Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution press, 2001), 3. 27. This is a broad field of literature. In addition to Shaffer’s See America First, see for example Fran- cis Farquhar, History of the Sierra Nevada (Berkeley: University of California press, 1965); John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University press, 1989); hereafter cited in the text as “Sears.” See also Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (Berkeley: University of California press, 2000); Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University press, 2000); Richard Grusin, Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2004); hereafter cited in the text as “Grusin.” Sears notes that popular constructions of Yosemite of the mid-nineteenth-century focused on the park’s role as a “wonder” or curiosity; the idea of preservation/conservation did not come into play until later in the nineteenth century (Sears, 130). Grusin intriguingly argues that the creation of Yosemite in 1864, when it was ceded to the state of California by Congress, “constitutes the creation of a technology for the reproduction of nature as landscape”; he cites an early report on the park by Frederick Law Olmstead as “a complex expression of a cultural logic of recreation, a logic which relies upon structural parallels between the preservation of Yosemite and several of the related cultural practices in which the origins of American environmentalism are embedded. . . . Olmstead represents Yosemite’s preservation in terms of a structure of aesthetic agency so systematic in late- nineteenth century America as to appear to be natural” (Grusin, 16, 21–22). 28. Thomas Frederick Howard, Sierra Crossing: First Roads to California (Berkeley: University of California press, 1998), 12–14. In his writings from California, Muir mentions bushwhacking and following animal trails in addition to what appear to be built trails. See John Muir, Steep Trails: Cali- fornia, Utah, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, the Grand Cañon, in The Writings of John Muir: Sierra Edition, vol. 8 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918). While the history of recreational trail-building needs further exploration, certainly many of the currently used trails in the Sierras were in place by the 1930s. See Walter Augustus Starr, Guide to the John Muir Trail and the High Sierra Region, 1st ed. (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1934). I thank Jeff Schaffer for pointing me to this source. M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 466 29. C. Frank Brockman, “Development of Transportation to Yosemite,” Yosemite Nature Notes 22, no. 6 (June 1943): 53. 30. Brockman, “Development of Transportation to Yosemite,” 55. 31. Farquhar, History of the Sierra Nevada, 182. 32. See Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, and Grusin. 33. National Geodetic Survey Data Sheet for Mt. Whitney, accessed 27 May 2012, http://www. ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/ds_mark.prl?pidBox=GT1811. 34. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 85, series IV, box 149, folder 2780. 35. postcard dated 27 September 1912, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 85, series 1, box 8, folder 170. 36. Anne Brigman, “Just a Word,” Camera Craft 15, no. 3 (March 1908): 87. 37. Hansen, “Albert Smith, the Alpine Club,” 304. 38. Anne Brigman, “The Glory of the Open,” Camera Craft 33, no. 4 (1926): 158. 39. Brigman, “The Glory of the Open,” 158. 40. Brigman, typescript of foreword (see note 2). 41. David peeler, The Illuminating Mind in American Photography: Stieglitz, Strand, Weston, Adams (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester press, 2001), 282. 42. Michael Branch, “John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911),” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11, no. 1 (2004): 143. 43. The Sierra Club’s policies were perhaps best represented in the work of Ansel Adams, who was a few decades younger than Brigman and who certainly knew of Brigman’s work. Indeed, the potential cross-fertilization of Adams and Brigman is a project that requires further study. Like Brigman, Adams saw his forays into the Sierras as a way to encounter “the wonderful Spirit of the mountains” (quoted in peeler, The Illuminating Mind, 283). Their stylistic differences aside—Adams rejected his initial pictorialist style for a near-fetishization of clarity for which he became best known—the two photog- raphers certainly overlap in their stress on the transformational powers of their alpine experiences. 44. Letter dated July 1912. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 85, series 1, box 8, folder 171. 45. Solnit, Wanderlust, 149. 46. Anne Brigman,”Awareness,” Design for Arts in Education 38 (1936): 18. 47. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 22. 48. See Kate Nearpass Ogden, “Sublime Vistas and Scenic Backdrops: Nineteenth-Century painters and photographers at Yosemite,” California History 69, no. 2 (1990): 134–53; and Deborah Bright, “The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and photographic Aesthetics,” Art Journal 51, no. 2 (1992): 60–71. 49. Brigman, “The Glory of the Open,” 163. 50. Colley, Victorians in the Mountains, 123–25. 51. Ehrens has painstakingly documented Brigman’s unique process. After shooting her original film (either on glass plates or standard film), Ehrens explains, Brigman “first made interpositives from her original black and white negatives, using transparency film on which she then did extensive handiwork. After altering the interpositives, she would make new negatives which were then used to make photographic prints. Her many techniques for altering the interpositives include[ed] using pencils, pints, and etching tools to add or eliminate elements.” (Ehrens, 26). The interpositive of the photograph of Brigman on the ledge discussed here, as well as other works by Brigman, are available digitally through the George Eastman House’s Brigman, Kasebier, et al Positives series. Visit http:// www.geh.org/ar/strip81/htmlsrc/brigmanetal_sld00001.html. 52. See, for example, “Why wear Icebreaker merino?” Icebreaker Merino Website, https:// us.icebreaker.com/en/why-icebreaker-merino/why-wear-icebreaker-merino.html. 53. Letter dated 4 July 1917, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 85, series 1, box 8, folder 168.