Mrs. Bertha Jacques

The photographer Elizabeth Buehrmann studied with Eva Watson Schütze, a promoter of Pictorialism—a movement in photography that promoted its aesthetic, rather than documentary, value and explored techniques to manipulate photographic negatives. When she was just 17, Buehrmann became an associate member of Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession, a group of American photographers that he handpicked to help advance the perception of photography as a fine art. Newspapers in Buerhmann’s hometown of Chicago loved her intimate portraits, like this photograph of the talented etcher and photographer Bertha Jacques (1863–1941)—and the fact that Buehrmann was a “pretty and popular” teenager. Although Buehrmann traveled to advance her career, she returned home after feeling intimidated by more successful photographers. She later moved to New York but gave up photography after suffering a breakdown at age 40. Her late-in-life correspondence with the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows that she didn’t fully appreciate her achievements.