Kasebier, Gertrude (1852-1934), American photographer, active around the turn of the 20th century in a movement known as pictorialism. Käsebier and other pictorialists believed that photography was not merely a tool for objectively recording reality but was instead an art form similar to painting and subject to the photographer’s manipulation.

Their photographic style was influenced more by avant-garde developments in painting than by the photography of their day. Käsebier, for example, used a soft focus and other devices to make her images more expressive. Her portraits show the influence of American portrait painters of the era, such as Americans James McNeill Whistler and William Merritt Chase. One of Käsebier’s most famous images, Blessed Art Thou Among Women (1899, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), exemplifies her recurring fascination with the theme of motherhood, a theme she shared with many female artists of the era, including American painter Mary Cassatt. Many of Käsebier’s other photographs express themes of solitude through images of isolated figures.

Born Gertrude Stanton in Des Moines, Iowa, she spent several years of her childhood in Colorado, but from the age of 12 lived in New York City. In 1874 she married Eduard Käsebier, a German businessman. Gertrude Käsebier did not begin studying art until the age of 37, when her children were approaching adolescence. From 1889 to 1894 she studied drawing, painting, and other subjects at the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, New York, but Pratt did not offer courses in photography, a subject that interested her. After her studies at Pratt, she spent a year taking photographs in Germany and France and learning more about the technical processes of photography as an apprentice to a German chemist.

In late 1897 or early 1898, after her husband became terminally ill, Käsebier decided to open a commercial portrait studio. In June of 1898 she introduced herself to American photographer and gallery owner Alfred Steiglitz, who would become an important supporter of her work. The first solo exhibition of Käsebier’s photographs took place in 1899 at Steiglitz’s gallery, The Camera Club. In 1902, along with Stieglitz and American photographer Clarence White, she became one of the founding members of the Photo-Secession, a group that promoted photography as an alternative to other forms of art.

Her works were featured in the first issue of the group’s magazine, Camera Work, in 1903, and between 1902 and 1910 she showed her photographs regularly in Photo-Secession exhibitions in Stieglitz’s new Gallery 291. Käsebier enjoyed financial success as a portrait photographer, photographing members of the wealthiest circles of society as well as members of the artistic world, including Stieglitz and French sculptor Auguste Rodin.