“The problem with Cunningham is her versatility. She is not easy to categorize as a portraitist, for she had no formulas and responded to each subject freshly. Consistent are her genuine interest in each person’s uniqueness, her strong sense of design, and her ability to use light dramatically.”
~ Gretchen Garner
Known as the Grandmother of Photography, there wasn’t an emerging photographic style that she didn’t explore beginning with pictorialism including her studies of flowers and continuing with the straight photography of Group f/65, modernism in her photographs of California industries, street photography during the Beat Generation age and in post-war Europe, and, perhaps what she loved the most, portraits. Towards the end of her long career, when asked about her importance, her response was, “Well, I don’t know. It’s very annoying. It might turn out that way in the end, if I don’t do anything too dreadful from now on. “
Childhood
Imogen Cunningham was born April 12, 1883 in Portland, Oregon to Isaac Burns Cunningham and Susan Elizabeth Johnson Cunningham. She was named after Shakespeare’s character in Cymbeline. She had an unconventional childhood. Her father was a spiritualist, theosophist, free thinker and vegetarian. Her mother was a Missouri Methodist. When Cunningham was 3 years old the family moved to Washington to join the Puget Sound Co-operative Colony, a collective in Port Angeles with the aim of providing a secure living for employees and employers alike. In 1901, the family left the collective for Seattle where Cunningham was enrolled in public school. During this time, Cunningham characterized herself as “ill-tempered” and went on to say, “I was always absolutely on my own, going somewhere being interested in something, and no one in my family was interested in the same things.”
Cunningham showed artistic abilities from an early age. During her high school years, in 1901 at the age of 18 she sent away for a photography correspondence course that included a 4×5 view camera. Her father even built a darkroom for her out in the woodshed and paid for her photography classes. She mostly photographed the people around her. But she soon lost interest and sold her camera to a friend.
However, her interests change in 1906 which, at the age of 23, she saw Gertrude Käsebier’s work. That impressed her deeply and she committed her life to photography.
Education and Training
Cunningham enrolled in the University of Washington. One of her professors was Horace Byers who taught chemistry. He convinced her that to be a photographer required a background in chemistry, so she specialized in the chemistry of photography. She paid her tuition in part by photographing plants for the botany department. Based on her work in chemistry, she produced a paper titled “Modern Processes of Photography.” Also, during her time there, she participated in the German club and the chemistry club and was on the yearbook staff.
Upon her graduation in 1907, she worked for Edward S. Curtis, the famous photographer who devoted his life to documenting the history of Native Americans. In his Seattle studios, she printed and retouched his negatives and learned the art of platinum printing.
Two years later, Cunningham was awarded a fellowship from the Washington chapter of the sorority she had help to found, Pi Beta Phi. She used the money to study in Dresden, Germany at Technische Hochschule with Professor Robert Luther. She did very little photography during her stay there but rather focused her attention on her studies. Regarding her time in Dresden, she had this to say about the fact that she was the only woman in the lab: “the people who taught were very nice. I’m sure they thought I was a bit of a freak, but that didn’t seem to make much difference.” In 1910 she published a paper that summarized her work there titled “About the Direct Development of Platinum Paper for Brown Tones.” It described her process to increase printing speed, improve clarity of highlights tones, and produce sepia tones.
Upon completing her studies with Luther, she returned to Seattle by way of London where she met with Alvin Langdon Coburn, and New York where she met with Alfred Stieglitz and Gertrude Käsebier. Later, in a letter, she commented on her visit with Stieglitz and Käsebier. “I was greatly impressed and rather afraid of him. I did not express myself in a way that anyone could possibly remember and I felt Stieglitz was very sharp but not very chummy. I also looked up Gertrude Käsebier, who was most cordial.”
She Launches Her Career
Cunningham had only $12 in her pocket when she returned to Seattle in 1910. She set up a portrait studio in her living room. Her style of photography during this period was pictorialism, a method that involved manipulating the negative and/or photograph to achieve an artistic result, often characterized by soft focus and sentimental renderings. It didn’t take long before she established a solid reputation. Early on, a review lavished praise on her work. “In addition to a thorough technical knowledge of her art, she has a fine imaginative feeling and a sense for the fitness of things which characterizes the true artist, whatever be the means of expression.”
As her reputation grew, she was given a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1914. And around the same time her portraits were in included in the International Exhibition of Pictorialist Photography in New York and a portfolio of her work was published in Wilson’s Photographic Magazine. She was on her way.
The following year, Cunningham married Roi Partridge, an etching artist, print maker and teacher. She photographed him in the nude which created quite a scandal. She wasn’t bothered by it in the least. Her reaction was succinct, “a terrific tirade on my stuff as being very vulgar, [but] it didn’t make a single bit of difference in my business. Nobody thought worse of me.” Between 1915 and 1920, they had three children. Gryffyd was born in 1915 and in 1920 they had twins, Rondal, and Padraic. Also, in 1917 they moved from Seattle to San Francisco at Cunningham’s insistence.
1920s
The 20s was when Cunningham entered the most creative period of her life. It began with a move from San Francisco to Oakland where Roi taught art classes at Mills College, a liberal arts college for women.
She moved on from the soft, dreamy prints of pictorialism and became more interested in straight photography which lent itself to her new interest in form and detail. With Roi occupied with his teaching, she was responsible for caring for their sons and running the business which impacted her photography. She turned to photographing flowers in her back yard which resulted in some of her most famous and revered photographs. In fact, she devoted two years to photographing magnolia flowers.
Her portraits from this period took on new qualities as well. Now they emphasized clarity, form, definition and the persona of the person she was photographing. And a family trip to the San Francisco zoo resulted in a study of zebras. Her work resembled the Modernist school of that time, a movement that held that photography could and should be accepted as art on its own unique qualities and not try to emulate paintings and etchings.
Not only did she explore new subject matter, but she delved into new technologies. For example, she made her first double exposure during this time. The image showed her mother with a pewter pitcher filled with spoons superimposed on her head like a crown. Later on she would pick up the Polaroid camera and explore its possibilities.
In 1926 her photograph Glacial Lily was on exhibition in the Los Angeles 
County Museum where Edward Weston saw it. He was so impressed he immediately wrote to her.
“I had one thrill and it was your print — Glacial Lily — it stopped me at once, I did not note the signature until I had exclaimed to myself — ‘this is fine!’ It is the best thing in the show, Imogen, and if you keep up to that standard you will be one of a handful of important photographers in America — or anywhere. Thank you for giving me rare pleasure.”
This was the beginning of strong relationship with Weston who had already established himself as one of the leading photographers in the country.
Cunningham started submitting her photographs to various publications, but they were consistently rejected.
Towards the end of the decade Cunningham began making industrial photographs. One of her first subjects was the oil fields in Southern California where she photographed the oil derricks on Signal Hill. She also photographed the Nabisco Shredded Wheat factory in Oakland. Her interest in photographing industry would extend into the coming decade.
In 1928, Cunningham had an exhibition in a Carmel gallery. Weston, who lived in the area, saw her work and commented.
“She uses her medium, photography, with honesty, —no tricks, no evasion: a clean cut presentation of the thing itself, the life of whatever is seen through her lens, —that life within the obvious external form. With unmistakable joy in her work, with the unclouded eyes of a real photographer, knowing what can, and cannot, be done with her medium, she never resorts to technical stunts, nor labels herself a would-be third-rate painter. Imogen Cunningham is a photographer! A rarely fine one.”
And finally, in 1929 Weston had one more contribution to make to Cunningham’s standing as a photographer. The Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart, Germany mounted an exhibition titled “Film und Foto” and Weston was invited to help select photographs. He invited Cunningham to submit ten of her flower photographs, all of which were accepted.
1930s
Cunningham continued her exploration of subject matter and technologies. In 1931 she met Martha Graham, dancer and legendary choreographer, at a dinner party. They hit it off and later Cunningham photographed Graham. In one session, Cunningham shot ninety Graflex negatives of Graham. Two of her photographs ended up in Vanity Fair, breaking her string of publication rejections.
When Vanity Fair saw what Cunningham could do, they hired her to photograph California celebrities. It was Cunningham’s goal to “penetrate the facade of Hollywood stars by realistically and unglamorously documenting them off the set.”
She continued to photograph for Vanity Fair in Southern California until, in 1034, she was asked to moveto New York. She asked Roi to come with her, but he was unable or unwilling to leave and asked her to stay in California until he could accompany her. Cunningham wouldn’t wait and went to New York without him. That triggered their divorce. Cunningham contributed to Vanity Fair until it stopped publishing in 1936. Her work with Vanity Fair, Sunset and other magazines included portraits of Gertrude Stein, Minor White, James Broughton, Martha Graham, August Sander, Man Ray and Theodore Roethke among others.
As Cunningham’s style evolving into straight photography, she was a perfect fit for Group f/64 and in 1932 was a founding member along with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Willard Van Dyke. She explained the mission of Group f/64 this way. “This does not mean that we all used the small aperture, but we were for reality. That was what we talked about too. Not being phony, you know.”
The following year, Cunningham founded the California Horticultural Society. That was a natural for her given her large portfolio of plant images. They were so detailed that more than one graduate student studied them for their theses. Many have compared her plant photographs to the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe.
Cunningham’s influence continued to spread and she was included in a major exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1937.
Her Late Period
Imogen Cunningham remained active for the next 36 years until she died in San Francisco on June 23, 1976 at the age of 93. During those years she continued to explore new avenues of photography taking up street photography, both in the United States and Europe.
After the war, in 1945 Ansel Adams and Minor White formed a new Department of Photography at the California School of Fine Arts. He assembled a stellar faculty that included Imogen Cunning, Dorothea Lang and Edward Weston to name a few. At that time the California School of Fine Arts was already a well-established and highly revered learning institution, having been established in 1871 as the San Francisco Art Institute. It opened classes in 1874 and remains in operation today.
Besides teaching intermittently at the CSFA, Cunningham’s main source of income was her portrait business. This was augmented by her commercial photography business in which she continued to photograph industrial landscapes.
Cunningham also made several excursions to Europe in the 1950s and 60s. It was there that she picked up street photography. Europeans were still recovering from the horrors of the war but she was able to find examples of romance and reconciliation with the environment and among people. Also, in the 60s Cunningham documented the Hippie era in San Francisco’s Height-Ashbury district with her photographs. She called these photographs “stolen pictures.” Her approach to street photography was low key. “I don’t hunt for anything, I don’t hunt for things, I just wait until something strikes me.”
Cunningham published several books. She authored her last book titled After Ninety when she was 92. It was published posthumously in 1977. It contains previously unpublished portraits as well as some of her earlier works. It deals with the wisdom, dignity, despair and loneliness of old age.
Throughout her career, Cunningham participated in scores of exhibits and received numerous major awards. In 1967 she became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1968 the Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland was bestowed upon her. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1970 to fund work on her earlier negatives. And finally, in 2004 she was admitted to the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.
Her Legacy
Imogen Cunningham is largely recognized as the Grandmother of Photography for her longevity and her role in establishing photography as a fine art. Contributing to that, she never stopped experimenting with new techniques and technologies. Her style of photography evolved with the times, encompassing pictorialism, straight photography, precisionism and modernism.
She was an independent spirit that could be boldly direct at times. Ansel Adams said of her, “I used to say that Imogen’s blood was three percent acetic acid. She seemed to have an acid reaction to so many things, and she could be very abrupt. But she had another side too.” In her own words, she once said, “I don’t know. I don’t love the world. I think Jupiter should have hit us. I don’t like a lot of people in it, just a few.”
Nevertheless, she couldn’t have produced those deeply penetrating portraits had she not had a more sensitive, tender side. For example, Judy Dater attended one of Cunningham’s seminars and they became great friends, even collaborating on their works. Dater had this to say about her in one of her books about Cunningham.
“Imogen is difficult, if not impossible to sum up. Her life was a complex one, and I am left with strong impressions that have in part been confirmed by the people who speak in this book[.] [S]he was certainly a courageous woman, one with a mind of her own, who worked hard all of her life. The fact that as a young woman she chose to go into chemistry as an avenue to photography, both fields that were traditional male preserves apparently did not seem remarkable to her.”
Also, Hilton Kramer, chief art critic for the New York Times being just one of his many credentials, wrote, “Empathy rather than esthetic invention has been her forte, guiding her eye and her lens to her most powerful images.”
Her impact is still felt. Exhibitions of her works continue to travel around the country and the world and new books about her and her works continue to be published.
The Grandmother of Photography was an amazing person.
| Note: Very few if any of Imogen Cunningham’s photographs are in the public domain. For that reason, I have only included a scant smattering of them. However, I recommend this link not only for highlights of her work but as an account of her development and growth as a photographer.
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/cunningham-imogen/artworks/ |
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