On the 18^th of May 1852, leading American pictorialist photographer Gertrude Käsebier was born in Des Moines, Iowa. Artistically trained at the Pratt Institute, then in France and Germany, she started off as a magazine photo-illustrator, opening her own portrait studio on Fifth Avenue in New York at the end of the 19th century. Her work ‘Blessed art thou among women’ was among the photographs featured in the first issue of Alfred Stieglitz’ Camera Work in 1903. A divorced woman with children, she started her career late and against all odds attained great success and fame for a woman of her position and era, becoming a role-model for others to follow, such as Imogen Cunningham. She is known for being one of the first female artists to advise women to train professionally in the “unworked field of modern photography” to earn an independent living.

In 1898, Käsebier…