Imogen Cunningham’s photography spans 70 years of the twentieth century, during which photography became the new way of seeing and interpreting the world. A master photographer whose compelling portraits of such diverse personalities as Herbert Hoover and Martha Graham appeared in Vanity Fair and Aperture, she was not interested in developing a philosophy or theory of photography, but was an immensely talented and innovative artist who sought to explore reality through her lens. Her commitment to her art is reflected in her prolific portfolio, which demonstrates her important role in the history of twentieth-century photography.
Cunningham was born in Portland, Oregon, on 12 April 1883. During her youth, her parents encouraged her artistic talents by paying for summer art classes. She became interested in photography and began experimenting with it while studying chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1903. Although there was no official photography department, she learned chemistry as a basis for further study of photography.
In 1905 she began experimenting with a 4×5 inch camera, which she ordered from a mail-order correspondence school. She made her first portraits in 1906, one of which was of herself naked in a field on the university campus, ”Self-Portrait” (1906). To support herself, she worked as a secretary, making slides for botanists. Her father continued to encourage her and built her a darkroom in a woodshed where the only light was a candle in a red box. She graduated in 1907 with a degree in chemistry; her thesis was entitled ‘The Scientific Development of Photography’. She then worked for two years with Edward S. Curtis, famous for his photographic study The North American Indian, from whom she learned platinum printing techniques and how to retouch negatives.
Two events occurred between 1907 and 1910 that led her to consider photography as a career. The first was an article she read in April 1907 about the work of New York photographer Gertrude Kasebier in a magazine called The Craftsman. Cunningham was deeply moved by Kasebier’s studies of mother and child, and the article’s suggestion that photography could capture an emotional moment – that it was more than just a scientific chemical process – struck a chord with the young artist. The second event was a trip she took to Dresden in the autumn of 1909, after receiving a scholarship from her university club. While in Germany, she studied with the photochemist Robert Luther at the Technische Hochschule and visited the International Photographic Exhibition, where she had her first opportunity to see some of the best European and American photographic art of the time. Although she took few photographs during her travels, she was inspired by the great museums of Europe and the artists she met in Paris and London.
After a stop in New York, she returned to Seattle in September 1910, opened a portrait studio and began exhibiting her work, which was often portraits of close friends.
As a female photographer, Cunningham took some risks early in her photographic career. One risk was her keen interest in nude photography at a time when America was still suffering from the conservatism of the Victorian era. In support of the idea of the modern, independent woman, she also published an article entitled ‘Photography as a Profession for Women’ in her sorority’s magazine, The Arrow, in 1913, in which she urged women to develop their own style in photography and other professions, rather than simply trying to copy what men were doing. This conviction – risky at the time – remained with her throughout her life.
One of the most significant influences on her work during this early formative period was the art she saw in the avant-garde magazine Camera Work, edited by Alfred Stieglitz. This quarterly magazine introduced her to many of the new, young, experimental photographers that Cunningham would later come to know personally. Although Stieglitz ceased publication of Camera Work in 1917 and she never made it into the magazine herself, the type of photographic work illustrated – the beginnings of the clean, modern style – influenced her work throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As well as Camera Work, Vanity Fair caught her attention in her mid-teens with its progressive nude studies and its pages of avant-garde culture.
In 1914 she had her first solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. In February of the following year, she married Roi Partridge, an etcher from Seattle, with whom she had corresponded for two years while he studied art in Europe. When the war forced him to return to the United States, he became Cunningham’s husband and model. Their first son, Gryffyd, was born in December of that year.
The following year, she published a nude photograph of her husband in the Christmas edition of Seattle’s The Town Crier, which at the time was considered daring.
The family moved to San Francisco in 1917, where Cunningham gave birth to twin sons Rondal and Padraic; she spent the next few years with her three young children, confining herself to photographing close friends, family and the plants in her garden, which would be a focus of her experimental work throughout the 1920s.
She returned to commercial portraiture in 1921 after her family moved to Oakland and her husband took a teaching position at Mills College.
During these years she and Partridge became part of a group of artists that included Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange and Anne Brigman. Cunningham broadened her artistic horizons towards avant-garde experimentalism and, like many other young artists, was greatly influenced by publications such as the October 1922 issue of Vanity Fair, which featured Man Ray’s now infamous portrait of the Marchesa Casati. This double exposure influenced Cunningham’s portraiture, turning her focus to more abstract detail, as seen in photographs such as Two Callas (1929). She was also influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s famous Dada painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2).
By the end of the 1920s, her work was routinely double-exposed and she experimented with different techniques, using plants and portraiture as subjects. She also continued to study the nude, often using her husband Partridge and her three children as models.
The end of the decade was marked by a local exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum, showing works from her plant series, and, more importantly, her participation in the landmark Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany, where she exhibited 10 prints of what have become some of her best-known photographs, including studies of fleshy, prickly agave, aloe plants and calla lilies.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Cunningham moved from the close-up, sharply focused plant studies and avant-garde experimentalism of the 1920s to celebrity portraiture and then street photography. In 1931 she exhibited at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, and after two photographs of dancer Martha Graham were published in the December 1931 issue of Vanity Fair, the editors asked her to take on commissions to photograph such personalities as actors Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, Joan Blondell and James Cagney, and President Herbert Hoover. She divorced Partridge in 1934 and moved to New York for a short time to do more work for Vanity Fair, including photographs of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s mother, Mrs James Roosevelt, but soon returned to California to be closer to her sons. She continued to make portraits of people as diverse as the writer Gertrude Stein, the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and the writer Upton Sinclair, who was then running for governor of California.
She joined the f/64 group, organised by Willard Van Dyke in 1932, which included Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. This group was a very informal gathering of members who were primarily interested in realism and truth in their work. This aim is reflected in the name of the group, f/64, which represents the aperture setting on a camera that gives both the greatest depth and the sharpest focus. In the late 1930s, she began what would become a lifelong focus on street photography, as her work shifted to subjects that focused more on the social conditions of mid-century America and the post-war civil war.
Cunningham opened her own studio on San Francisco’s Green Street in 1947, and over the next 13 years her work was exhibited across America, while she continued to take street photographs when not commissioned for portraits. During these post-war years, she began to teach intermittently at the California School of Fine Arts (San Francisco Art Institute). It was during this time that she befriended Lisette Model, a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, who had a profound influence on her portraiture. Together, the two women searched the backstreets of San Francisco for radical and unusual images. In contrast to Model’s often unforgiving and stark photography, Cunningham’s images reveal a mutual respect between her and her subjects, often the homeless or downtrodden who inhabited San Francisco’s seedier neighbourhoods.
In the 1960s, Cunningham ran a portrait gallery, taught portrait classes and photographed the Bay Area’s Beat Generation and flower children. In her work from this period, Cunningham not only depicts the everyday life of this counterculture, but also explores the role of interracial relationships in a time of segregation, as in the photograph of a couple in a San Francisco cafe in Coffee Gallery, San Francisco (1960).
In the same year, she was recognised by the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, which purchased a collection of her work. She used the money to travel and photograph in Western and Eastern Europe.
In 1964, Minor White had an entire winter issue of Aperture devoted to her work, reproducing 44 images from her early work and several new portraits.
In 1967 she was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, and towards the end of the decade she received an honorary doctorate from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.
Cunningham turned 90 in 1973, and these last years seemed to have been the busiest of her life.
She received a Guggenheim Fellowship to reprint her early glass plate negatives, had a major exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was named Artist of the Year by the San Francisco Art Commission. In the last year of her life, she appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and CBS produced a documentary celebrating her work and life.
Although she had become a celebrity, she continued to work, and her final and perhaps most fascinating project was a series of works called After Ninety, a study of the lives of nonagenarians.
For this project about old age, she re-photographed people from her own past, including her ex-husband Roi Partridge and Ansel Adams. The most moving portraits in this final series are her intimate portraits of women, such as Irene ”Bobbie” Libarry 3 (1976) – a nude of a former carnival performer whose entire body is tattooed – and melancholy studies of the residents of convalescent homes and convents, such as the pensive woman in Woman in Convalescent Center, Berkeley (1975).
Cunningham died in San Francisco on 23 June 1976, aged 96, while still working on this last project.
