Silver Gelatin Print Photograph, 8x9 1/2" Mounted on card and titled and dated in pencil 1934
Imogen Cunningham is credited with helping to bring West Coast influence to mainstream photography. Cunningham was a founding member of the San Francisco Bay Area based group f/64, along with Ansel Adams and Willard Van Dyke, her work was featured in the groups 1932 exhibition at M.H.de Young Memorial Museum. Her work remains in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art NY, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, The National Gallery of Art Washington DC, among hundreds of others.
Imogen Cunningham (April 12, 1883 - June 24, 1976) was an American photographer known for her photography of botanicals, nudes and industry.
Cunningham was born in Portland, Oregon. In 1901, at the age of 18, Cunningham bought her first camera, a 4x5 inch view camera, from the American School of Art in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She soon lost interest and sold the camera to a friend. It wasn’t until 1906, while studying at the University of Washington in Seattle, that she was inspired by an encounter with the work of Gertrude Kasebier to take up photography again. With the help of her chemistry professor, Dr. Horace Byers, she began to study the chemistry behind photography; she subsidized her tuition by photographing plants for the botany department. After graduating in 1907 she went to work with Edward S. Curtis in his Seattle studio. This gave Cunningham the valuable opportunity to learn about the portrait business and the practical side of photography.In 1909, Cunningham won a scholarship from her sorority (Pi Beta Phi) for foreign study and, on advice from her chemistry professor, applied to study with Professor Robert Luther at the Technische Hochshule in Dresden, Germany.In Dresden she concentrated on her studies and didn’t take many photos. In May 1910 she finished her paper, “About the Direct Development of Platinum Paper for Brown Tones”, describing her process to increase printing speed, improve clarity of highlights tones and produce sepia tones. On her way back to Seattle she met Alvin Langdon Coburn in London, and Alfred Stieglitz and Gertrude Kasebier in New York. Once back in Seattle she opened her own studio and won acclaim for portraiture and pictorial work. Most of her studio work of this time consisted of sitters in their own homes, in her living room, or in the woods surrounding Cunningham's cottage. She became a sought after photographer and exhibited at the Brooklyn Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1913.
In 1914 Cunningham's portraits were shown at “An International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography” in New York and a portfolio of her work was published in Wilson's Photographic Magazine
In 1929, Edward Weston, nominated 10 of Cunningham's photos (8 botanical, 1 industrial and 1 nude) for inclusion in the "Film und Foto" exhibition in Stuttgart. Cunningham once again changed direction to become more interested in the human form, particularly hands (and a further fascination with the hands of artists and musicians). This interest led to her employment by Vanity Fair, photographing stars without make-up or false glamour. In 1932, with this unsentimental, straightforward approach in mind, Cunningham became one of the co-founders of the Group f/64, which aimed to “define photography as an art form by a simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods”.
Imogen Cunningham was one of the most groundbreaking female photographers in the first half of the century. Her main focus was portraiture which she became very popular through but she did some of her most important experimentation with her up close botanical photographs. Cunningham was influenced by the German movement New Objectivity and the photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch. Her works are very similar to Georgia O’Keefe’s with her abstracted flowers and precision photos. Cunningham used design, contract and abstraction to make her photos unique and timeless.
Cunningham was part of the West Coast photography movement which started around 1910. Photography was not straight forward in the early 1900’s, photographers purposely blurred their photos and used a grainy finish. Cunningham started to be influenced by New Objectivity which was equivalent toAmerican’s Preciscionist movement. The focus of this German movement was on pure objective presentation of visual facts. She read Das Deutshe Litchtbild which profiled botanical photos by Albert Renger-Patzsch (right). He explored flora by formally examining it in his photos. The result revealed essential designs of nature and presented analogies between the elemental structure of flora and aspects of industrial design. Cunningham’s “False Hellebore” (left) from 1926 can be compared to one of Renger-Patzsch’s botanical photographs. The up close direct focus on the botanical is obvious in both of them. Both artists use light to create contrast, but Cunningham uses even more contrast in her photo. The basic differences between the two are simply one was meant for recording a flower and one was mean for fine art. Cunningham brought this German idea to the West Coast when she started her magnolia studies.
Cunningham did not see Georgia O’Keefe’s work until 1934 when she went to do a solo show and photograph Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keefe’s husband. O’Keefe and Cunningham both experimented with the Precisionist movement. This is evident in Cunningham’s “Shredded Wheat Water Tower” from 1928 and O’Keefe’s “City Night” from 1926. Both artists use extreme angles for the composition of architectural forms. The industrial subject matter, harsh angles and straight lines are typical of the Precisionist movement. O’Keefe chooses to keep a restricted palette, in some of the paintings in this series there is no color and they are black & white like a photo
Imogen Cunningham was a remarkable photographer who influenced West Coast photography in more ways then one. Her up close straight forward was influenced by the German “New Objectivity” and helped guide her into a new era of photography. Her work and O’Keefe’s are remarkably similar and they share the same passion for representing botanical subject matter. Her use of design, contrast and abstraction create beautiful pure photographs that are timeless.
