In 2002, Frank Goodyear, a curator at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., was contributing to an exhibition of photographic portraits of artists. Among the best of the lot were a few strikingly elegant, Pictorialist-influenced portraits of such major turn-of-the-century figures as Everett Shinn and Daniel Chester French, taken by a photographer about whom almost nothing was known except her name, Zaida Ben-Yusuf, and that she had a studio on Fifth Avenue. It is hard to imagine a Middle Eastern woman operating as a photographer in New York City at that time; perhaps “Zaida Ben-Yusuf” was an exotic-sounding pseudonym.

Goodyear’s curiosity deepened and led him on a five-year quest to rescue this remarkable photographer from obscurity. As Goodyear discovered, Zaida Ben-Yusuf was, in fact, her real name, and she was born in London in 1869, the daughter of an Algerian father and a German mother. Her father’s family may have been Muslim or Jewish; in England he was active in a Christian missionary society. Whatever her antecedents, Goodyear observes in this book that “Zaida was surely aware—especially after relocating to New York [in 1895]—that her ethnicity shaped how others perceived her.”

So, of course, did her gender, and one of the fascinating aspects of Ben-Yusuf’s life story is the way she inhabited certain roles in which a woman could achieve aims that were outside the norm for her time. She was an artist, unmarried, a businesswoman, a Bohemian, a proto-feminist—in short, the “New Woman” par excellence. Only two years after arriving in New York, Ben-Yusuf was boldly writing to Alfred Stieglitz, who published her work in his journal Camera Notes. That gave her entrée into the world of artists and writers, and many of the portraits she made of them are reproduced in this book (published in conjunction with a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery opening this month). Here are Shinn, French, William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, Sadakichi Hartmann (an art critic and a great champion of Ben-Yusuf), William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton, among many others, including political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and General Leonard Wood. The portrait of Shinn is particularly noteworthy for its pared-down compositional simplicity and its unconventional, eloquent pose. Goodyear notes that the treatment of the Ash Can School painter’s left hand anticipates by more than 15 years Stieglitz’s studies of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands.

Ben-Yusuf favored subjects who embodied traits she prized in herself. In 1901 she wrote, “My best work represents the man of brains, either in business or professional life, and the thoroughly modern, modish, clever woman, and these are the ones I enjoy photographing when I am in the mood for work. The ‘sloppy,’ so-called artistic person does not appeal to me at all, for I consider a perfectly set-up modern woman to be as picturesque a subject as any ever portrayed.” She herself, the daughter of a successful milliner, was fashion-savvy and always “perfectly set-up,” as her self-portraits reveal. In matters of technique, she favored a minimum of backdrop for portraits, unconventional composition and platinum prints that favored mood over detail.

For about 10 years, Ben-Yusuf was a whirlwind of photographic activity; in addition to portraits she did travel essays; an illustrated essay on Japan ran in the Saturday Evening Post in 1903. Then, all of a sudden, around 1907, discouraged for reasons that are not totally clear, she abandoned photography and went into the millinery trade, following in her mother’s footsteps. In this she was, unsurprisingly, successful. Late in life she married; in 1938 she died. She had long since dropped out of the story of American photography, and this valuable book redresses that injustice, not only in words but in pictures. Goodyear’s archival diggings yielded negatives that had been shoved into files haphazardly and all but lost. Many of the images here have not been reproduced in decades, and some have never been seen at all.

Zaida Ben-Yusuf: New York Portrait Photographer by Frank H. Goodyear III. Merrell, $59.95.