Anne Wardrope (Nott) Brigman (1869 - 1950)

Anne Wardrope Nott was born December 3, 1869 in Nu‘uanu Pali, Hawaii, United States.^[1] She was a daughter of Mary Ellen Andrews and Samuel Nott.^[1]

When she was sixteen her family moved to Los Gatos, California.

In 1894 she married a sea captain, Martin Brigman.^[1][2] She accompanied her husband on several voyages to the South Seas. By 1900 Brigman stopped traveling with her husband and resided in Oakland, California.

The couple separated before 1910 and she lived in a cabin on Thirty-Second Street with her dog Rory, a dozen tamed birds, and occasionally with her mother. She began photographing in 1901. Soon she was exhibiting and within two years she had developed a reputation as a master of pictorial photography. The first public display of her work came in January 1902.

She opened a teaching studio in Berkeley. Soon her allegorical studies appeared in Photograms of the Year and her portraits of California celebrities. A partial list of her California exhibitions, which were reviewed extensively in the press between 1904 and 1908. In 1907 Brigman completed eight illustrations for William E. Henley's poem I Am the Captain of My Soul.

Brigman quickly gained recognition outside of California. In 1903 she was listed as an Associate of his famous Photo-Secession and two years later she was listed as an official Member. In 1908 she became a Fellow of the Photo-Secession. From 1903 to 1908, Stieglitz exhibited Brigman's photos many times, and her photos were printed in three issues of Stieglitz's journal Camera Work. During this same period she often exhibited and corresponded under the name “Annie Brigman,” but in 1911 she dropped the “i” and was known from then on as “Anne.” In 1908 the Secession Club held a special exhibit for her photographs in New York.

The Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. staged in 1904 one-person exhibitions of her work. In 1905 her photo entitled The Vigil was shown at the London Salon. She was elected to membership in the British art photographers’ “Linked Ring” and exhibited two “dramatically poetic prints” at its Salon of 1908. Her photograph entitled The Kodak–A Decorative Study was the prize winner selected for the cover of the 1908 Kodak catalogue and her The Moon Cave, along with many of her other photos, was shown at the Worcester Art Museum's Fourth Annual Exhibition of Photographs. In 1909 she won a gold medal in the Alaska-Yukon Exposition as well as awards in Europe. She continued to exhibit for many years, and was included in the landmark International Exhibition at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in New York in 1911.

She was also known as an actress and in 1908 she played Sybil of Nepenthe in two performances of a play by Charles Keeler presented by the Studio Club of Berkeley in the Hillside Clubhouse; Brigman even served as a “judge” in a baby beauty contest. She performed as a poet both her own work and more popular pieces such as "Enoch Arden".

In June 1913 Brigman was the subject of a feature article and extensive interview in the San Francisco Call. That September she completed the illustration for the title page of the first book published by the California Writers’ Club, West Winds. In August 1921 she held a solo exhibition at the Gump's Gallery in San Francisco and two months later contributed to the First Annual Oakland Photographic Salon. Between 1923 and 1926 she displayed her “imaginative nudes” at the International Exhibitions of the Pictorial Photographic Society of San Francisco in the Palace of Fine Arts and the Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Between 1908 and the mid-1920s Brigman frequently vacationed in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where she exhibited her photos at several of the seaside salons. She began to study etching in Carmel and exhibited her prints “of fine design and feeling” in April 1925. In August 1926 her photos were paired with the block prints of William S. Rice in a show at Morcom's Gallery in Oakland; the following March she exhibited her photographs at the Fine Arts Society of San Diego. The following March she submitted a photograph of “figures in a somber dance” to the Exhibition of Dance Art at San Francisco's East-West Gallery.

In 1929 she moved to Long Beach, California, where she lived alone in a number of apartments near the ocean. She held a major solo exhibition at the Bothwell and Cooke Galleries in January 1936. In 1940 she lived in Los Angeles and gave her occupation as “writer”. Within three years Brigman had returned to Long Beach, where she was a member of the Poets’ Guild and the Writers’ Market League.

Declining vision led her to abandon professional freelance photography in 1930 although she continued photography through the 1940s. In the mid-1930s she also began taking creative writing classes, and soon she was writing poetry. She put together a book of her poems and photographs called Songs of a Pagan. She found a publisher for the book in 1941, but because of World War II the book was not printed until 1949.

Brigman died on February 8, 1950, at her sister's home in El Monte, California.^[1]

Sources

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3} California Deaths and Burials, 1776-2000, Anne Brigman, 1950; El Monte, Los Angeles, California.
2. ↑ United States Census, 1900, Annie W Brigman in household of Martin Brigman, Oakland city Ward 2, Alameda, California, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 346, sheet 6B, family 136.