Gertrude Käsebier

American (1852–1934)
Happy Days, from Camera Work, No. 10, April 1905
Photogravure
Museum purchase, Horace W. Goldsmith and Art Purchase Funds     89.111.4

Gertrude Käsebier began studying photography at the age of thirty-six, and operated a commercial portrait studio in New York for more than twenty years.  Her work garnered critical praise for its simplified backgrounds and soft, muted focus.  Käsebier ardently encouraged women to pursue careers in photography and in the mid-1910s founded the Women’s Professional Photographers Association of America.

Happy Days was taken on a working vacation to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1903.  Originally intended for her daughter, it features Käsebier’s two-year-old grandson, Charles O’Malley.  However, its unusual cropping and low perspective create an intimate and universal portrayal of childhood.  In 1905 Alfred Stieglitz included Happy Days in his influential photography quarterly, Camera Work, one of the few journals that regularly published photographs by women.