She was a Fellow of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession, a circle of photographers whose artistic efforts succeeded in raising photography to a fine art form.

[4] Artists like Boughton then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplifying this emerging type through their own lives.

[8] Among her more famous works are portraits of Eugene O'Neill, Albert Pinkham Ryder, George Arliss, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Agnes Lawrence Pelton.

[9] As Boughton's photography career grew she became noticed by famous photographers in her field, like Alfred Stieglitz.

[11] The following year Stieglitz gave her, along with fellow photographers C. Yarnall Abbott and William B. Dyer, an exhibition at the Little Galleries.

In 1909 she had six of her photographs and an essay called “Photography, A Medium of Expression” published in Stieglitz's journal Camera Work (No 26, April, 1909).

A collection of her portraits, Photographing the Famous, was published in 1928, and included William Butler Yeats, Julia Ward Howe, Henry James, Walter de la Mare, G. K. Chesterton, Maxim Gorky, John Burroughs, Ruth St. Denis, Eleonora Duse and Yvette Guilbert as subjects.