page_title: Myra Albert Wiggins
section_title: Master of photography (1900–29)
hierarchical_section_title: Myra Albert Wiggins / Life / Master of photography (1900–29)
caption_attribution_description: English: "Two Pilgrims" (Myra Albert Wiggins - right; Lucille Park - left). Tipped in photograph from Wiggins' book.
context_page_description: Myra Albert Wiggins was an American painter and pictorial photographer who became a member of the important early 20th century Photo-Secession movement.
context_section_description: In 1900, Wiggins was given first of two one-woman exhibitions of her photography at the Chicago Art Institute. She had already met and corresponded with the most important photographer of the time, Alfred Stieglitz, and in 1903 he admitted her as a member in the newly formed Photo-Secession.
  In the fall of 1903, one of Wiggins photographs was included in the Hamburg Jubilee Exhibition in Hamburg, Germany, and in the London Salon organized by the famous Linked Ring. A review of the latter exhibition in the British magazine Photography contains these words of praise:
  "All things considered, we consider Mrs. Wiggins' picture called Polishing Brass one of the finest in the whole room. It certainly is the most pictorial, and is exactly like a print by Chodowiecke  [sic], both in subject and feeling. A woman is seated at a table with metal utensils of quaint and interesting form. The whole thing is quiet, healthy, and exceedingly well-designed – an example for hundreds."
  In 1904, Wiggins was one of five Oregon delegates selected to go on a "Cruise of the Christians" to attend the World's Fourth Sunday School Convention in Jerusalem. She photographed scenes both on the boat and when she arrived, often developing the film in her room at night. On the return trip she stopped in Paris and London specifically to see major photographic salons that were on exhibit at the time. Later that year she published Letters from a Pilgrim (Salem: Statesman Publishing), a photographically illustrated description of her journey to the Middle East.
  That same year, Stieglitz sent 200 photographs representing the best artists of the Photo-Secession to the Hague International Photography Exhibition.  Among those artists he included were Wiggins and her Oregon colleague Sarah Ladd. Wiggins also had photographs published in several important magazines, including Photo-Era, The Photo Miniature, Photograms of the Year and Die Kunst in Der Photographie (a high quality German quarterly similar to Camera Work).
  Wiggins' mother Mary died in 1905 after being in a car wreck. Her father, who was driving, was not injured, but he suffered greatly from guilt and anguish in the following years.
  In 1906, she was included in the invitational exhibit "The Work of Women Photographers of America" at the Camera Club of Hartford, Connecticut.  Wiggins was one of 26 women who were presented in the show. Later that year two of her photographs were included in the annual members exhibit at Stieglitz's Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York.
  By 1907, Fred Wiggins wanted to enter the plant nursery business and he moved his family to Toppenish in central Washington. Fred started the Washington Nursery Company, and Wiggins tried to help her husband financially by opening an art studio and school. Her new hometown area was much more rural and undeveloped than Salem, and much of the countryside around the town was dry and dusty. The dust caused health problems for Wiggins, and it was several years before she could produce a regular income from her painting.
  Wiggins continued to photograph as much as her health allowed, and she exhibited again at the Little Galleries in New York and at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in San Francisco. Fellow Photo-Secessionist Anne Brigman commented on Wiggins' photos in the latter show, saying she "invariably infuses her work with an atmosphere of tender sadness."
  Over the next decade Wiggins' photos were shown in many important exhibitions, including the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in New York City (1909), the Annual Pictorial Photography Invitation in Seattle, Washington (1910) and the landmark International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography (1910) at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Encouraged by the interest in her work by other photographers in Seattle, Wiggins started to spend more time in that city.
  From the mid-1910s to the late 1920s, she alternated between helping her husband with his business and taking her photographs to Seattle when there was enough money to go. During this time 
caption: Myra Albert Wiggins: Two Pilgrims (self-portrait of Wiggins on the right). Published in her book Letters from a Pilgrim, 1904
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