Carl Sadakichi Hartmann

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. When she was just 17, Buehrmann became an associate member of Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession, a group of American photographers handpicked to advance the perception of photography as a fine art. Newspapers in Buerhmann’s hometown of Chicago loved her intimate portraits—and the fact that Buehrmann was a “pretty and popular” teenager. The poet and art critic Sadakichi Hartmann (1867–1944), the subject of this photograph and an early popularizer of the tanka and haiku poetic forms, admired her individual eye. Buehrmann later moved to New York but gave up photography after a breakdown at age 40. Her late-in-life correspondence with the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows that she didn’t fully appreciate her own achievements.