This portrait of Ellen Koeniger, a family friend of Stieglitz's, was one of approximatley a dozen executed at the family compound, Oaklawn, on Lake George in upstate New York. John Szarkowski, in his essay for the 1996 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George (which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as well) contrasts the severity of Stieglitz's rigorous aesthetic credo, as proseletyzed in his New York City gallery, with the more relaxed atmosphere of the summer retreat, suggesting that the freedom loosened Stieglitz's vision. "By 1916 [however] he was able to regard the casual life of the place as material that could serve his serious artistic ambitions. One day that summer he made at least six extraordinary pictures of Ellen Koeniger finishing her swim in the lake. In their freedom from pictorial contrivance, these seem unprecedented in Stieglitz's work; in earlier pictures the kinetic element represented one variable note in an otherwise secure and conventional chord. ...The entire subject is in constant flux, and each moment proposes a new problem. A few years later Stieglitz began to photograph clouds in motion..." (op. cit., pp. 22-23).