keyshape

anne brigman - "the cricket's song" (1908) (Photo and quote via utata.org)

She visited the Sierras often enough that she developed what she called "friendships" with several individual trees and peaks. In 1926, after she'd become an established photographer, Brigman wrote an article for Camera Craft magazine in which she described her relationship with one such tree. "One day on one of my wanderings I found a juniper - the most wonderful juniper that I've met in my eighteen years of friendship among them…It was a great character like the Man of Gallilee or Moses the Law-giver, or the Lord Buddha, or Abraham Lincoln…Storm and stress well borne made it strong and beautiful. I climbed into it. Here was the perfect place for a figure; here the place for the right arm to rest, and even though my feet were made clumsy by boots, I could see and feel where the feet would fit perfectly into the cleft that went to its base." Brigman describes how she spent a couple days "caring" for the tree; tidying up around its roots, removing unattractive stones and pebbles, trimming "small extraneous branches" and generally preparing it for a photograph that she might never take.