The Prelude

Laura Gilpin was a student at the Clarence H. White School of Photography, where she trained in professional and commercial photography and adopted the soft-focus, expressive Pictorialist style. The Prelude was her first widely circulated photograph. It was taken as a publicity photograph of the Edith Rubel Trio, a musical group that Gilpin played in with her close friend, sculptor Brenda Putnam. The wide tonal range of the print, including its rich, velvety blacks, is a characteristic of the platinum paper on which Gilpin printed her image, an unusual choice for an American photographer. Typical of Pictorialism, Gilpin used a soft focus for this photograph, but she did not hand manipulate her negative like the early Pictorialists did. Later in her life, Gilpin abandoned her more Pictorialist approach in favor of the sharper focus of straight photography, which she used to photograph Native Americans in the southwest for her 1968 book The Enduring Navaho.