Imogen Cunningham

A luminary of modern photography, Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976) was one of the first professional American female photographers. Cunning is best known for her pioneering work in botanical photography, portraiture and nudes. Born in 1883 in Portland, Oregon, Cunningham purchased her first camera at the age of 18. She later studied chemistry at the University of Washington, where she wrote her thesis on the chemical processes of photography, setting the foundation for her future career.

Cunningham caused a stir early on in her career, when, as early as 1910, she began photographing nudes, often males, in provocative poses. During this period, she produced nude self-portraits, which further helped establish the young artist as a vanguard to challenge traditional notions of femininity in an era still at the heels of the restrictive Victorian culture.

Many artists have explored visual fragmentation of the human form, especially the female body. Surrealists, in particular, lingered on the fractured feminine: from René Magritte’s disembodied breasts to Hans Bellmer’s twisted dolls. Cunningham explored such fragmentation, with an aim to create more elegant and subtle transformations than many of her male contemporaries.

By the 1920s, Cunningham shifted away from the soft-focus, pictorial style of her work in the 1910s towards a more modernist aesthetic. With the influences of the German photographers, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt, she began to explore a cleaner, straightforward investigation of her subject. Cunningham combined the influences of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), Bauhaus and the American Precisionist movements in her work.

Cunningham had always found an attraction to botanical specimens as subject matter and this interest began to develop more fully with her series of images of the magnolia blossom. Between 1923 and 1925, Cunningham made an extended series of magnolia flower studies which became increasingly simplified as she sought to recognise the form within the object. The results are best represented by the well-known Magnolia Blossom and its counterpart, a detail of the magnolia’s core, Tower of Jewels (1925).

Cunningham was also known for her portraits of notable figures in art and culture, including Frida Kahlo, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray and Ruth Asawa. She was part of the the influential Group f/64, San Francisco Bay Area’s vibrant artistic community, alongside contemporaries such as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. Cunningham was celebrated throughout her lifetime; she was the recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship in Creative Arts for Photography in 1970. Imogen Cunningham died in 1976 at the age of 93.