Though Stieglitz heralded her as a preeminent modernist photographer, Brigman’s painterly photographs soon fell out of favor. For decades after her death in 1950, the art world neglected Brigman—and yet her work is finally now seeing the recognition it deserves. What the beauty and the overt romanticism of the images conceals is their true subversive spirit. “I wanted to go and be free,” Brigman wrote of the Sierras. “I wanted the rough granite flanks of the mountains and the sweet earth.…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.” [1]