Imogen Cunningham

Photographer

  • Born: April 12, 1883
  • Birthplace: Portland, Oregon
  • Died: June 23, 1976
  • Place of death: San Francisco, California

American photographer

Cunningham demonstrated that an unqualified humanistic approach to using the camera could celebrate the individual subject as well as the art form.

Area of achievement Photography

Early Life

Imogen Cunningham (IH-moh-jehn KUHN-nihng-ham) was the fifth child of ten in the family of Isaac Burns Cunningham and Susan E. Johnson Cunningham. The family was poor, and Isaac took on various jobs over the years to support his large family. He was an extremely independent and strong-minded man qualities that his daughter absorbed to sustain her art throughout her life. At the time Imogen was born, he operated a small wood and coal business in Seattle, Washington. Imogen was close to her father, who recognized her intelligence and appreciated her desire for an education. She did not begin school, however, until she was eight because the family home was somewhat remote from town. From that time on and with her father’s encouragement, she took art lessons on the weekends and during school vacations.

Cunningham eventually attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where she could live at home and work as a secretary to pay for her education. She had already decided by her second year of college that she wanted to become a photographer, and a faculty member suggested that she major in chemistry to achieve that goal. The following year, she bought her first camera from the American School of Art and Photography in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and began to process her photographs in a woodshed darkroom her father made for her. During her senior year, she worked in the studio of Edward S. Curtis, famous for his photographs of Native Americans. From Adolf F. Muir, a studio technician, she learned the skills of retouching and platinum printing.

Completing her course work at the University of Washington in three and a half years, Cunningham won a fellowship from her college sorority that provided her with $500 to study in Germany. With this money and an additional loan, she spent a year studying photochemistry at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden with Robert Luther, an internationally known photochemist. Luther developed her earliest awareness of the need to incorporate the personality of her sitters into their portraits. While in Dresden, she saw an international photography exhibition and developed a heightened awareness of photography as an art form.

On her way home to Seattle in 1910, Cunningham visited Paris, London, and New York. In London, she arranged to meet photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. She met photographer Alfred Stieglitz, at his avant-garde New York gallery 291. During her visit to New York, she also met Gertrude Käsebier, who particularly impressed Cunningham by demonstrating that strong photographic images could be made by women.

With a studio of her own, Cunningham immediately began to create commercial portraits to support herself and adopted the pictorialist style for her art photographs. The ascendent style of that period, pictorialism employed a romantic soft-focus technique for the human figure, often posed in landscape. A narrative association was often suggested through the title and the theatricality of the pose. After her marriage to Roi Partridge, an etching artist, in 1915, Cunningham used him as a nude model in a series of wilderness portraits. The publication of these photographs caused a scandal in Seattle, no doubt increasing her disregard for other people’s response to her art.

Cunningham gave birth to her first child, a boy, in 1916. In 1917, she and her husband moved first to San Francisco, where their twin boys were born, and then to nearby Oakland, California, where Partridge taught art at Mills College. Unfortunately, little work exists from Cunningham’s early period; during the first move, Cunningham smashed most of her glass negatives because they were too heavy to transport.

Life’s Work

During the years from 1916 to the early 1920’s, while her children were very young, Cunningham was tied to home. She continued to photograph people, including her children, using the pictorialist style; at the same time, she began to use the plants in her backyard as subjects. This change proved to be serendipitous. She not only developed an intense interest in botanical subjects but also changed from a pictorialist approach to a hard-focus one. The hard-focus style brings a sharpness to the presentation of the subject, a sharpness she emphasized by photographing in strong light. Strong dark-light contrasts produced abstract effects that Cunningham incorporated into her mature style. She photographed the material up close and often cropped the image to concentrate on the portion she wanted to present. For example, in Magnolia Blossom (Tower of Jewels) (1925), only the pistil and stamens of the blossom are shown, with the petals severely cropped to allow the viewer’s knowledge to fill in the rest of the blossom. Cunningham’s flower and plant forms are among her best-known work. She was always willing to try new subject matter and different ways to manipulate prints and negatives. During these years when she was working out of her home, she was forced to investigate what was close to her, and she found a way to make this a strength.

People who knew Cunningham have remarked that throughout her life she was an experimental artist, always willing to try something new. At the same time, they have acknowledged that she was a sloppy technician. She probably learned very early that, with active children around, she had to get work in her basement darkroom done quickly or it would not get done at all.

In the late 1920’s, Cunningham came into contact with work of the precisionist artists, who applied sharp focus to machines and industrial buildings to show these subjects as beautiful abstract forms. Cunningham tried this, too, and turned out satisfying prints. The humanist in her was not satisfied with this new approach for long, but it was a useful expansion of her success with plant forms. By the end of the 1920’s, she was regarded by some as the most sophisticated and experimental photographer working on the West Coast. Her friends during these years included many photographers who, along with Cunningham, were exhibiting in the San Francisco area and, in 1929, in an international photography exhibition held in Stuttgart, Germany.

Cunningham began to apply her art photography techniques to her commercial photos in 1931, when she began working as a freelance photographer for Vanity Fair magazine, published in New York City. Her new subjects were famous artists and film stars. In these photographs, she combined many of the techniques that she had explored for several years: close-ups, sharp focus, and multiple exposures. She sharpened her skill in working with the subjects by conversing with them and waiting for the right moment that would allow their personality to reveal itself.

In 1932, Cunningham was one of three major founding members of a new group, Group f.64 (Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were the other major members). The group was short-lived, existing primarily to put on an exhibition, but their influence was immediate and long-lasting. The name derived from the smallest aperture available on a large-format camera, resulting in the greatest depth of focus and sharp detail. They theorized, in keeping with a realist emphasis in twentieth century art philosophy, that negatives should be printed on glossy paper without manipulation for example, no retouching or double exposures. Group f.64 not only followed an idea to its logical conclusion but also remained an inspiration for generations to come in advancing these ideas. True to her experimental nature, Cunningham did not follow this approach for long. From this time on, she exhibited with increasing frequency as her reputation steadily grew.

In 1934, Vanity Fair invited Cunningham to work for the magazine in New York City. Her husband could not accept that she had an independent life as a professional; when she would not defer the trip, he initiated divorce proceedings against her. To support herself in these Depression years, she had to increase greatly her commercial work, largely working for magazines as well as making private portraits. She continued to work for Vanity Fair from the West Coast. Cunningham said that of all the informal movie star portraits she made during this time, she most liked doing the homely men, such as Wallace Beery and Spencer Tracy, because they had no illusions about themselves.

Cunningham replaced her clumsy large-format camera in 1936 with her first small camera. The new camera did not change her style, but it must have made her work much easier. Cunningham was only five feet, four inches tall, had a slight build, and was in her fifties when she made the substitution.

In 1946, Cunningham moved to San Francisco, where she lived for the rest of her life. Although she became a standard fixture of the art scene, enjoying some measure of celebrity, she never allowed her public character to detract from the seriousness of her work. In 1954, a new San Francisco gallery, the Limelight Gallery, became the first to exhibit and sell photographs exclusively. Cunningham was asked to be part of the gallery’s inaugural exhibition; a solo show followed the next year. The prestigious International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York, acquired a large collection of her work in 1959. Aperture, a highly respected art photography magazine, published the first monograph on her when it devoted an entire issue to Cunningham in 1964. Exhibitions of her work were mounted in important museums around the country: at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in 1959; at the Chicago Art Institute in 1964; and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1973. By this time, she had already exhibited at most of the museums in the Bay Area.

In her eighties, Cunningham became concerned about the disposition of her life’s work, began sorting it, and discovered negatives she did not know she had. Several decisions resulted. She applied for and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970, when she was eighty-seven, to print negatives from throughout her career that she had never had the time or money to pursue. Rather than give her work to a museum, she created the Imogen Cunningham Trust in 1975 to preserve her photographs and negatives and make decisions after her death about their promotion, exhibition, and sale. To make this decision public, she accepted an offer to appear with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and, typically for her, stole the show. During her lifetime she received many honors, including election as a Fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967.

After turning ninety in 1973, Cunningham undertook a significant new photography project, a book called After Ninety. She sought out and photographed a large collection of people over the age of ninety because she wanted others to see and appreciate the vitality and diversity of older people. She died at the age of ninety-three, working up until the end in spite of suffering from periods of vertigo.

Significance

Cunningham’s photography career did not really get under way until she was in her forties. She had worked hard at her chosen field until then, experimenting with new ideas of all kinds and incorporating what worked. This willingness to try everything within her means remained a lifelong strength that others saw and imitated. She proved at the same time that it was not necessary to own the latest equipment to produce interesting work that was on the cutting edge. She was always willing to teach what she had learned to others. Her ability to photograph people sympathetically and interestingly has created a standard against which any photographer must be measured.

Bibliography

Cunningham, Imogen. Imogen Cunningham: Selected Texts and Bibliography. Edited by Amy Rule. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992. The book contains a biography, a chronology, writings by Cunningham, texts referring to her, and a bibliography.

Dater, Judy. Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1979. A host of people who knew Cunningham personally are interviewed: family, friends, art world associates, and people she photographed.

Heiting, Manfred, ed. Imogen Cunningham, 1883-1976. New York: Taschen, 2001. A collection of Cunningham’s photographs that also features an essay about her work by Richard Lorenz and a portrait of Cunningham taken by photographer Edward Weston.

Lorenz, Richard. Imogen Cunningham, Frontiers: Photographs 1906-1976. Berkeley, Calif.: Imogen Cunningham Trust, 1978. Ten of Cunningham’s photographs are accompanied by a short biography.

Sills, Leslie. In Real Life: Six Women Photographers. New York: Holiday House, 2000. Discusses how the work of Cunningham and five other women photographers was influenced by their lives, experiences, and imaginations.

White, Minor. “Imogen Cunningham.” Aperture 11 (1964): 134-175. The entire issue is a monograph devoted to Cunningham and her work.

1901-1940: February 17, 1902: Stieglitz Organizes the Photo-Secession; 1921: Man Ray Creates the Rayograph; February, 1930: Luce Founds Fortune Magazine; November 23, 1936: Luce Launches Life Magazine.