Sipprell had an early professional start, apprenticing at her brother’s photography studio in Buffalo and showing with the Buffalo Camera Club before becoming a student of famed pictorialist Clarence H. White and, in 1915, moving to New York and establishing her own business.

It was around this time she photographed a woman in a white dress, a quintessential pictorialist subject of romantic, nostalgic, and abstract ideals. The soft focus of the composition and the delicate tissue paper it is printed on give the image a dreamlike quality. The woman looks down demurely, wearing a gauzy dress and loose hairstyle that further emphasize her grace and beauty, moving her out of the mundane contemporary world into a sentimental dreamscape. By this time, some of the originators of pictorialism had abandoned the soft-focus style influenced by impressionist and tonalist painting for sharp, modernist photography, but it remained popular in the U.S. for decades.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)