Jessie Ann Gaebele

Jessie Ann Gaebele was an American photographer whose career provides a rare record of a woman building a professional life in photography in the early twentieth-century Midwest. Jessie Ann Gaebele served as Photographer.

She worked in commercial studios and developed technical and artistic expertise at a time when photography was becoming an increasingly important profession, documenting individuals and communities through formal portrait work.

In Jane Kirkpatrick’s A Flickering Light, Fifteen-year-old Jessie Ann Gaebele enters F. J. Bauer’s Winona photography studio in 1907 and discovers that her artistic eye is matched by a talent for the hazardous business of darkrooms, explosive flash powder and commercial portraiture. In Jane Kirkpatrick’s An Absence so Great, at eighteen Jessie Gaebele leaves Minnesota for Milwaukee and other Midwestern towns, taking charge of studios whose owners have been disabled by mercury poisoning.