Eva Watson Schutze, a portraitist in league with Alfred Stieglitz and his photo secessionist movement, exemplified late-19th-century ideals of the “new woman” as well as the era’s “new photography.” A dedicated pictorialist, she embraced an artistic style of subjective, soft-focus lyricism, derided as “fuzzography” by mainstream photographers of the time, who espoused sharp-focus realism.
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Born in New Jersey, she originally studied painting with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, but found her “imaginative impulses all paralyzed.” Turning to photography, she opened her own studio in Philadelphia in 1897. “There will be a new era and women will fly to photography,” Watson Schutze wrote to Frances Benjamin Johnston, a pioneering Washington photojournalist.
