Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 20))

had no companions in those old Colorado days, for her brother was but an
infant then; but she had a most wonderful imagination, and made compan-
ions for herself out of the pots and pans in the kitchen and the flowers and
trees without. In her childish fancy, they held converse with her, and told
her many strange and wonderful things, she said. She would talk with them
by the hour, and for her they were imbued with fairy life. Ah, me! There
have been many changes since then,” and Mrs. Käsebier's old mother lapsed
into reminiscent silence.
Many changes there had been, and the subject of our conversation had
become one of the best-known workers in the pictorial photographic world.
Mrs. Käsebier had married, and her eldest daughter had grown almost
to womanhood, and become a really proficient musician, before her mother
had had the opportunity seriously to take up the study of art. Leaving the
West when still a young child, she, with her family, came East. Later she
tried, without success, to enter the old Cooper Union Art School—the only
art school of any importance then existing in New York—but the school was
overcrowded, there were applications a year ahead of hers. It was only after
her family was well grown that she was able seriously to turn to her art
studies. She took a course at the Pratt Institute, of Brooklyn, New York,
and later went to Paris.
Before entering upon her art course, she had possessed herself of a
camera, a crude clumsy affair, but her art teachers so inveighed against pho-
tography for serious picture-making purposes that she shamefacedly put her
camera to one side. When she was starting for Paris she practically promised
friends and teachers not to take her camera with her; but at the last minute
there remained a space to be filled in her trunk, which her camera just fitted,
so in it went, and the die was cast.
“ One day,” said Mrs. Käsebier in a lecture before the Philadelphia
Society, “when it was too rainy to go into the fields, I made a time exposure
in the house, simply as an experiment. The result was so surprising to me
that from that moment I knew I had found my vocation. I shall never forget
that low-ceilinged, dark-walled, north room in that old French village where
I made my first portrait study.”
From that time she worked on with all the vigor of an exceptionally
vigorous nature. She had no dark room, no running water, the twilights
were long, so that she could not begin her development much before ten
o’clock. Often she worked till dawn, carrying her plates down to the river
to wash them. Her camera was of American make, so that she had to have
her plates cut especially to fit her holders. This and similar inconveniences,
the least of which would have discouraged a less determined worker, she met
and vanquished. Realizing that her knowledge of chemistry was insufficient,
being entirely self-taught, and being more familiar with the German than the
French language, she went to Germany, where she apprenticed herself to a
German chemist.
“The first picture I gave him for criticism,” she relates, “was that of an
old woman standing in a strong sunlight. Pointing to the interesting shadow
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