In the summer of 1912, Käsebier was the guest of (John Murray) Anderson's family in St. John's, Newfoundland, where she planned to photograph out-of-doors. "When Newfoundland's weird light did not conform to her tonal approach, she adopted a more linear, architectonic style, ... an angular, restless quality that may have been induced by Cubist paintings shown at 291 or by Coburn's increasingly geometric style. Whatever the source, colleagues and critics immediately recognized the merits of her Newfoundland photographs."(cf. Käsebier, The Photographer and Her Photographs, pp. 139-40).

Her own observations were recorded in a a diary she kept: "I began to get my bearings and tried photographing without sunlight. The weirdness of it all seemed like a stage setting. The quality of the light and the coloring of the landscape in consequence was different from anything which I had ever seen in nature. The heavens were always gray with beautiful cloud effects, the scrubby pine trees were black against the mountains of dark gray, the many lakes reflected in turn the gray of the sky. ... A paradise for the painter, the etcher. A great despair to the photographer, because of the darkness."(Newfoundland Trip 1912, collection of Mason E. Turner)