Anne Brigman was born in Hawaii on December 3, 1869, and moved to California at the age of sixteen. In 1894 she married a sea captain, Martin Brigman. She trained as a painter but turned to photography around 1902. She was one of two original members of the Photo-Secession from California. She eventually became a Fellow, the only photographer from the West to hold such an honor. She worked in San Francisco and was one of the few photographers whose career continued to flourish after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Brigman moved to the Long Beach area around 1929. She is renowned for her photographs of nudes in the California landscape, in which she used spectacular locations such as the Sierra Nevada. She died in Eagle Rock, near Los Angeles, in 1950.

Pictorialism in California: Photographs 1900-1940
The J. Paul Getty Museum