Women Making History: Brooke Nipar

Samantha, Sally, Mary & Brooke.

If you’ve come across those four names in recent years, you know that combined they form the Voltron that was the founding editorial staff at one of the most worship-worthy magazines to ever exist—MissBehave.

Although, Brooke Nipar was the last to be added to the original group of editors, her job was just as important! Being the Photo Director/Editor of MissBehave required Brooke to handle all things photo based. She researched and hired all the photographers and then edit and chose all of the images that went into each issue. The special chemistry she had with the rest of the staff translated into every issue and the readers responded, falling head-over-heels, not only with the mag but with the ladies behind it.

Today, we feature Brooke, the gone-but-not-forgotten magazine’s former photo editor and a successful freelance photographer in her own right, as a woman making history.

Check the official bio:

After spending 23 sun-soaked years in the valleys and on the beaches of southern California, Brooke Nipar broke for New York City. Reared at the hands of rock n’ roll parents, she brought with her a unique vision. Years of listening to her forebears’ records, crashing punk shows and fleeing to remote desert raves have forged a singular energy and anyone who’s lucky enough to have met her can attest to it. Now transformed into a city girl, Brooke likes to spend free time from photo projects on the elusive hunt for an authentic L.A.-style burrito in New York and dancing with anyone bold enough to try and keep up.

The work of Brooke Nipar...

Brooke has done commercial work with some of our favorites! Nylon & MissBehave!

More of Brooke's commercial work...

Get familiar with Brooke via the M.I.S.S. survey...

Let’s get into some Q&A with Brooke Nipar…Ready? Let’s go!

M.I.S.S.: What woman, besides your mom or grandmother, do you find inspirational?

There are so many women I could mention here… One woman that always stands out as creatively inspirational is Bjork. She’s always evolving and pushing the boundaries. She’s strong, innovative and does whatever she wants.

Brooke & Cassie...& a shot of a young Brooke ready for her close-up!

Brooke Nipar x Cassie

M.I.S.S.: How did you get your start?

I started taking photos when I was in high school. My grandfather was a photographer, and when he passed away he left me his 35mm camera. I began taking black and white lab classes, and by the time I was out of high school I knew I wanted to study photography further. I went to Art Center College of Design, got my BFA and moved to NYC to start my career as a photographer ten days after graduation.

When I moved to NYC, I literally cold called photo editors and art buyers and begged them to take a look at my book. I cringe when I think back to the portfolio I used to show then, but you gotta start somewhere! The first person to give me an assignment was Jennifer Miller at Jane Magazine. I continued to shoot for Jane until the magazine folded in 2007.

Brooke can captue the animal in anyone...

...She can also capture redheads like no other!

M.I.S.S.: What’s your favorite photograph that you’ve taken?

This is honestly an impossible question for me to answer. My favorite photos ever taken are definitely not my own.

Shots Brooke took of some of our favorite songbirds...

M.I.S.S.: Who do you want to work with and/or photograph?

I really want to work with Karen O. I’ve been dying to shoot her for years. I’m a huge fan and I think she’s got such awesome style. I keep putting it out there in the universe, so hopefully it will happen one day!

Some behind the scenes shots & a super-rad personalized shot from M.I.A.!

M.I.S.S.: What part of photography is the most challenging and do you dislike the most?

The most challenging moments of being a photographer are the times when I have to make something out of nothing. This happens way more than most people realize. For example, there are times when you get hired to shoot a portrait and you have 5 minutes to make it happen and the location is terrible. That’s the toughest cause you still have to go back to the photo editor with a dynamic image, even though all of the elements aren’t perfect.

M.I.S.S.: Any advice for ladies who are just starting out in a career path similar to yours?

Define your style, be persistent and don’t get discouraged.

I would also remind them that becoming a successful photographer is much more than just taking good photos.

Thanks so much, Brooke!

Get more on the lovely photographer by dropping by her site at www.brookenipar.com…or get a little inimate with Brooke, by taking a peek at her diary: www.brookenipar.com/diary

© Utata Tribal Photography

During an era that forbade women to wear pants, Anne Brigman took off all her clothes for the sake of art. And the real catch: there were no men in sight. Anne photographed herself, her sister, and friends using California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains to backdrop a liberated woman decades ahead of her time.

Figure in a Landscape 1923 © Getty Museum

Anne was born in 1869 in Honolulu, Hawaii to English missionary parents. Her childhood was one of freedom, to the extent that she fondly remembered herself as being a “young savage” during those days. Growing up amid mango trees, guava, papaya, and bougainvillea, Anne knew nothing of the restraining hold that American society had on most women of the early twentieth century.

Cleft of the Rock, 1912

At the age of 16, Anne moved with her family to Los Gatos, California. By 25 she married a sea captain named Martin Brigman  and traveled with him to such foreign shores as China, the Pacific islands, and Australia. When she settled in Oakland, California, Brigman kept company with writers and artists like Jack London, Charles Keeler, and William Keith. However, much more attention has been focused on her friendship with the man who piloted Anne’s career: Alfred Stieglitz.

The Breeze c. 1910 © NCTimes

I would love to tell the story of how Anne first picked up a camera: what she first photographed, from whom she borrowed the equipment, and how she fell in love with the art of taking pictures. But these details can only be invented in our imaginations. What we do know is that Anne began as a painter, but by 1901 the camera served as her primary mode of expression.

© Utata Tribal Photography

Anne was an adventurous woman who found refuge in the solitary Sierra Nevada Mountains. Carrying her heavy camera equipment into this remote natural landscape, Anne would set the stage for her photographs.

During one milestone trip that Brigman made with her friends in 1906, she had an epiphany. In an instant, Anne saw the form of a woman emerging from the mountain surface. She recalled,

“One day during the gathering of a thunder storm, when the air was hot and still and a strange yellow light was over everything, something happened almost too deep for me to be able to relate. New dimensions revealed themselves in the visualization of the human form as part of tree and rock rhythms and I turned full force to the medium at hand and the beloved Thing gave to me a power and abandon that I could not have had otherwise.”

Soul of the Blasted Pine 1908 © Yale Visual Resources Collection

By posing herself and her friends in the nude, Anne harnessed the raw wilderness and feminine spirit together in one image. This woman unleashed herself to become part of the juniper, pine, or boulder on which she reclined. She let herself melt into a landscape scarred by the violence of nature. She allowed herself to be free.

Although she worked in an isolated setting, Brigman’s photographs caught the attention of prominent artists in California and New York. Seventy-five years after the first photograph was ever taken, photography still struggled to be recognized as fine art; yet one man was on the brink of changing this. Anne reached out to that photographer, and he reached back.

Portrait of Lydia Fuller 1921 © Scott Nichols Gallery

Alfred Stieglitz published the journal, Camera Works, and owned an art gallery called 291. When Anne first showed Stieglitz her photography, he immediately took her under his wing and proceeded to exhibit her work from 1904 to 1910. He published her work three times in Camera Works during 1909, 1912, and 1913 among other pictorialist photographers. Thus Anne’s entrance into the man’s world of photography was sealed, and she became one of the only West Coast members to join Stieglitz’ guarded collective, the Photo-Secession.

Self Portrait of Anne Brigman in San Francisco Call 1908 © Wikipedia

At a time when feminism, sexuality, and modernism were all in question, Anne came on the scene with clear intent and an unwavering will. Stieglitz promoted many women artists of the time: most notably Georgia O’keefe, Gertrude Kasebier, Pamela Colman Smith, and Katherine Nash Rhoades. Yet he presented these women as naïve, childish, and innocent creators. While Anne’s contemporaries used the nude body to symbolize sexual desire, Brigman used it as a tool for empowerment. She introduced the nude as a symbol of woman’s creative force, taking ownership over traditional voyeuristic views of the female body.

Via Dolorosa 1912 © Joseph Dasta Art and Antiques

As Anne’s career gained momentum and she became entranced in her work, she made a bold public display of independence. In 1910, she divorced her husband. Brigman recalled, “He had his way of thinking and I had mine and we developed along different lines. So now I am here, working out my own destiny.” Living alone in an Oakland studio, Anne focused on her craft, wrote poetry, participated in theatre productions, and traveled to New York to interact with fellow Photo-Secession artists.

Being the free spirit that she was, Anne didn’t exactly fit into the modernist art movement. At Gallery 291, she was introduced to modernist painters like Rodin, Matisse, and Cezanne. Yet she didn’t see eye to eye with their erotic portrayals of the human body, and Anne preferred to carry on with her photography in solitude.

Sanctuary 1921 © Scott Nichols Gallery

Working as a woman artist and living alone, outside the expectations of domesticity, Anne was anything but conventional. She recognized that many women were afraid to step into their own:

“Fear is the great chain which binds women and prevents their development, and fear is the one apparently big thing which has no real foundation in life. Cast fear out of the lives of women and they can and will take their place in the scheme of mankind and in the plan of the universe as the absolute equal of man.”

Taking her own advice to heart, Brigman was liberated as a woman of her time could be. As she put it herself,

“My pictures tell of my freedom of soul, of my emancipation from fear.”

Untitled (Portrait of a young woman) © Scott Nichols Gallery

It was this bold ideology that soaked Anne’s photographs in raw emotion. With a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass tucked under her arm, Anne set out to discover the wilderness in all its physical and spiritual capacity.

Anne Brigman Self Portrait © Beinecke Library

When Anne reached the age of 60, she decided to move south to Long Beach, California. Throughout the 1920s and 1903s, her photography became less aggressive and more reflective. She focused her lens on the sand erosion of her new home, finding beauty in the subtleties of composition and light.

Brigman died in 1950, leaving behind her a legacy of dramatic, free spirited women. One hundred years after her first treks into the High Sierras, this artist’s work still speak to the contemporary woman. And this is why, a year after Anne’s photography first impacted me from the walls of the San Diego Museum of Art, I present her to you in today’s art HERstory.

Bibliography:

Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keefe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle by Kathleen Pyne

Utata Tribal Photography: Sunday Salon by Greg Fallis

The highly anticipated Not Bad For A Girl x Addict SS08 MethodZip Hoody’s have dropped!  Designed by Karen Jane of NBFG, the first female artist to collaborate with the mighty UK-based label Addict. To mark the drop, NBFG hooked up with another super talented lady, photographer and graff artist Ethel, to create this incredible shot and launch a special giveaway.

Visit the NBFG site for details on how to enter!