For most of her career, Brigman photographed in a pictorialist style, with soft-focus images, gentle tonal gradations, and hand-alteration of the negatives. Her best-known works are evocative images of women in natural landscapes on the California coast. But by 1927, she had started to experiment with the modernist style that had gained dominance in the artistic circles where she lived in San Francisco, spearheaded by a younger generation of photographers that included Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston. In this close-up image of an agave plant, Brigman used extreme cropping to emphasize the patterns in its forms and to construct an abstract composition. Light delineates the individual stalks, throwing the spiny edges into sharp relief, and the metaphorical title inscribed on the verso transforms a prickly plant into a hot fire.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)