Photographs by Anne Brigman
Natural Woman: Rediscovering Anne Brigman's Pagan Vision (via Poetry Magazine):
While on one of these trips, Brigman fell down a porthole and mangled the left side of her body, partially severing her breast. The injury, and subsequent medical treatment, scarred her for life. “She appears to have had a mastectomy that was botched and sewn back together crudely,” says art historian Kathleen Pyne. “It must have been incredibly painful and taken a long time to heal, if it did at all.”This might have deterred other women from photographing themselves naked but not Brigman. Later, she manipulated photos to cast that side of her body in shadow, or she simply turned away from the camera. For her, nudity was an expression of the self in nature. She wanted to put the human figure “in rocks and trees,” she later wrote, “to make it part of the elements, not apart from them.”
In the following years, she returned to the mountains many times, either alone or with friends and sisters. As she wrote for Camera Craft, “We ate, and slept with the earth in the fullest sense in this glorious grimness. Under these circumstances, through the following years, […] I slowly found my power with the camera among the junipers and the tamarack pines of the high, storm-swept altitudes.”
When she was away from the mountains, she felt a “hunger” for the release they offered: I wanted to go and be free. I wanted the rough granite flanks of the mountains and the sweet earth. I wanted the stacatto [sic] song of wind around rocks and juniper branches. […] I wanted to forget everything except that I was going back to heaven, back to heaven in my high boots, and trousers, and mackinaw coat. That was all I wanted.
When not posing herself, Brigman enlisted her sisters and friends as models. She placed them against and around trees so they seemed to merge, thus contrasting the grotesque limbs with soft female forms. She called her models “slim, hearty, unaffected women of early maturity … toughened to wind and sun.”
Both of Anne Brigman's poetry books—Songs of a Pagan and Wild Flute Songs—are available for free through Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
More photographs can also be found through the Wilson Centre for Photography
The Cliff Temple by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
I
Great, bright portal,
shelf of rock,
rocks fitted in long ledges,
rocks fitted to dark, to silver granite,
to lighter rock—
clean cut, white against white.
High—high—and no hill-goat
tramples—no mountain-sheep
has set foot on your fine grass;
you lift, you are the world-edge,
pillar for the sky-arch.
The world heaved—
we are next to the sky:
over us, sea-hawks shout,
gulls sweep past—
the terrible breakers are silent
from this place.
Below us, on the rock-edge,
where earth is caught in the fissures
of the jagged cliff,
a small tree stiffens in the gale,
it bends—but its white flowers
are fragrant at this height.
And under and under,
the wind booms:
it whistles, it thunders,
it growls—it presses the grass
beneath its great feet.
II
I said:
for ever and for ever, must I follow you
through the stones?
I catch at you—you lurch:
you are quicker than my hand-grasp.
I wondered at you.
I shouted—dear—mysterious—beautiful—
white myrtle-flesh.
I was splintered and torn:
the hill-path mounted
swifter than my feet.
Could a daemon avenge this hurt,
I would cry to him—could a ghost,
I would shout—O evil,
follow this god,
taunt him with his evil and his vice.
III
Shall I hurl myself from here,
shall I leap and be nearer you?
Shall I drop, beloved, beloved,
ankle against ankle?
Would you pity me, O white breast?
If I woke, would you pity me,
would our eyes meet?
Have you heard,
do you know how I climbed this rock?
My breath caught, I lurched forward—
stumbled in the ground-myrtle.
Have you heard, O god seated on the cliff,
how far toward the ledges of your house,
how far I had to walk?
IV
Over me the wind swirls.
I have stood on your portal
and I know—
you are further than this,
still further on another cliff.
Source: Sea Garden by H.D.