Imogen Cunningham

American, 1883-1976

BiographyThroughout Imogen Cunningham’s (1883-1976) long photographic career, she gained acclaim for her constant innovation and exploration of subject matter and technique. She continues to be celebrated for her elegant nudes, botanical studies, and portraits, among other subjects.

While studying chemistry at the University of Washington (1903-07), Cunningham purchased a 4x5 camera from a mail-order correspondence school and learned the medium’s basics after seeing Gertrude Käsebier’s (1852-1934) photographs in a periodical. Upon graduating in 1907, she went to work as a professional photo-technician at Edward Sheriff Curtis’ (1868–1952) Seattle studio, where she learned how to make platinum prints and gained experience in daily studio operations. Two years later, she received a scholarship from Pi Beta Phi, an international student association, to further her photographic studies at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, Germany with Professor Robert Luther (1868-1945), a leading photographic chemistry expert. Cunningham returned to the United States after publishing her thesis, About the Self-Manufacturing of Platinum Papers for Brown Tones, in 1910. After a stop in New York, where she met Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) and other prominent photographers, she set up a portrait studio in Seattle. In addition to commercial work, she also produced soft-focus, allegorical images in the Pictorial tradition.

Following a move to California in 1917, Cunningham began to develop the modernist style for which she is best known in photographs of her family, friends, and surroundings. Embracing a straight photographic approach, she utilized tight, sharply-focused compositions of contrasting light and shadow that abstracted complex forms to celebrate the formal qualities of plants, flowers, and the human body, among other subjects. This work received international attention when the photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958), whom Cunningham met in 1920 while living in Oakland, invited her to contribute ten photographs to the seminal avant-garde Film und Photo exhibition in Stuttgart (1929). She also returned to commercial portraiture, and once Vanity Fair published her images of the dancer Martha Graham (1894-1991) in 1931, she received regular commissions from the magazine. The following year, Cunningham, along with fellow artists including Weston and Ansel Adams (1902-1984), was a founding member of Group f/64, a short-lived but extremely influential collective of West Coast photographers that championed “pure and straight photography” over Pictorialism. Cunningham exhibited her work consistently throughout her life and had many significant solo exhibitions. More recently, a major traveling retrospective was mounted in Europe by the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2012-13), and an American touring exhibition, Seen & Unseen: Photographs by Imogen Cunningham, opened at the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, FL on September 26, 2020. Her work is in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Art Institute of Chicago; Detroit Institute of Arts; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia, Madrid; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, among many others.

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