Antoinette Detcheva, pianist

Johan Hagemeyer came to the United States from Holland in 1911. Already an amateur photographer, he went to New York to meet Alfred Stieglitz, who encouraged him to pursue a career in photography. By the early 1920s Hagemeyer had a thriving portrait business in San Francisco and Carmel, California. From the 1920s through the 1940s, his studio served as a meeting place for artists and intellectuals, many of whom stepped in front of his lens—including the Bulgarian pianist Antoinette Detcheva, photographed by Hagemeyer in several poses. Hagemeyer was a close friend of noted California photographer Edward Weston, but he disagreed with Weston on the importance of sharp definition in photography, continuing to use a shallow depth of field and soft focus into the 1940s, even when exploring modernist subject matter.