Imogen Cunningham's iconic portraits blazed a trail for photography, art and women in general, writes Aidan Dunne
Imogen Cunningham was, according to her biographer Richard Lorenz, the quintessential American woman photographer of the 20th century.
Celina Lunsford, who has curated an exhibition of her work at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, goes further: "For me, she's the quintessential woman photographer of the 20th century, anywhere." The show opened last Thursday, International Women's Day, and certainly Cunningham, whose working life spanned a major part of the history of photography, is an ideal role model. Confident, fearless and ambitious, she is perhaps best known now for the close-up views of flowering plants she made mainly during the 1920s, and for her many remarkably empathic portraits of a wide range of subjects.
Several of these portraits occupy pride of place in the Sirius Centre. They are, Lunsford explains: "All of talented women who also turned out to be great survivors." They include dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, painter Frida Kahlo, and Helena Mayer, a fencer. The latter is viewed in her martial attire, sword raised.
"Mayer, who was a champion fencer in the 1930s, had to get out of Germany because she was of Jewish descent. She became a fencing instructor in Mills College, where Cunningham was teaching," Lunsford says. " Graham more or less invented modern dance. They met at a dinner party in Santa Barbara in 1931 and got on very well.
"Cunningham made 90 pictures of her in the course of one afternoon. In some of them, you can make out part of a cruciform scar on one of Graham's breasts. It turns out that she was one of the first women to be treated for breast cancer with surgery. She had a tumour removed and completely recovered." Frida Kahlo is an iconic figure, and Cunningham's portrait of her is poised and classical.
Cunningham was born in Portland, Oregon in 1883. One of eight children, she grew up on the family farm outside Seattle. "It was a small farm," Lunsford says. "They weren't wealthy or especially well off. But from the beginning she seems to have been an incredibly self-confident person." Her interest in photography surfaced early on. She learned how to make platinum prints at Edward Curtis's studio in Seattle. As soon as she began studying at the University of Washington, she managed to get together enough money to buy her first camera. That was around 1906.
"One of her first pictures was, rather daringly, a nude study of herself, lying on the lawn in the university garden." Cunningham had a scientific mentality. "She studied chemistry, and, as a student, she made botanical slides for the lecturers." She managed to win a scholarship to travel to Dresden to study the technique of platinum printing with a leading expert, Robert Luther. On route to Germany she called on a leading pictorialist photographer, Alvin Coburn. His mother, she later recalled, did not approve and, as soon as he left the room, glared at Cunningham and told her pointedly that no woman would ever be good enough for her son.
While at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden she published a scientific paper on the platinum process. On her return to Seattle she set up in business as a portrait photographer. "She was always a working photographer," Lunsford emphasises. That is, she didn't turn up her nose at commercial projects, happily taking on industrial photographic assignments, for example. "That was and is the reality. You can have exhibitions and win praise and sell prints, but that's not necessarily going to support you. She had to make a living and she got on with it."
In fact, around the time she was nominated as Seattle Woman of the Year, she wrote a piece in the local paper detailing the viability of photography as a career for women. "She was quite clear that it was not her intention to put men down. She just felt that women had to look out for themselves." Minor controversy ensued when it emerged that she had taken nude photographs of her husband-to-be, Roi Partridge, a printmaker, on Mount Rainier. "Soon after that - I'm not saying there was a connection - they moved to Northern California, settling in San Francisco." Within two years she had three sons, including twins.
Lunsford feels that her floral images arose partly out of practicality. "She was at home with her children. She spent a lot of time in the garden. Most of the plants she photographed she grew herself." One celebrated series explores magnolia blossom, and there are beautiful studies of cannas, calla lilies, hydrangea, echeveria, tuberose, agave and other plants. All of these images zero in on their subjects to the exclusion of everything else. Apart from an evident feeling for composition and form, there is a sense of excited discovery about them. Cunningham is using the camera lens as a way of teaching herself, and us, how to see in a way that we have not seen before.
There was considerable cross-influence between herself and other artists and photographers. The links with Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are clear, for example. Edward Weston had seen Cunningham's floral photographs before he embarked on his vegetative still lifes, Lunsford points out. She underlines Cunningham's sense of sculptural form, which is also evident in her nudes, where she treats the human body in exactly the same way as she does the flowers, making arrangements of volumes and hollows, patterns and textures, with an emphasis on spiral and curvilinear forms.
IN 1932, CUNNINGHAM was one of the founder members the Group f/64, along with the celebrated landscape photographer Ansel Adams, Weston and others. The name derived from the smallest aperture available on a large-format camera, and hence the one that produced the sharpest image with the deepest focus. The group was dedicated to the principles of "straight" or pure photography, which basically meant no trickery, no cropping and no enlargement of negatives.
Cunningham was accepted and respected as a peer by Weston and Adams who, apart from anything else, had great respect for her technical expertise.
She viewed the strictures of f/64 as an option rather than an obligation (she cropped negatives and made double exposures, for example), but she was definitely aligned with them.
While she had begun taking photographs under the influence of the dominant pictorialist school, which tended towards painterly effects, she quickly realized that the contrivance involved needlessly restricted the potential of the medium. In time, her own work, like that of Adams, came to push the technical possibilities of photography to the limit.
Vanity Fair had approached her to work as a portrait photographer, but that meant moving to New York, which Partridge was reluctant to do. After some prevarication, Cunningham opted to go and, by mutual agreement, they divorced. In the event, she soon moved back west, but she did continue to work for Vanity Fair. "The story goes that when they asked her what kind of subjects she would like to photograph she said: 'Send me ugly men.'" They didn't, needless to say, and her subjects included Cary Grant, James Cagney and many other Hollywood luminaries.
She was beginning to receive serious recognition, and her work was increasingly represented in exhibitions at home and abroad. Although she was technically proficient and scientifically minded, Lunsford notes, she worked intuitively: "She said that making a good photograph was like writing a good poem." During the 1950s, apart from her more formal portraits, she developed an interest in casual street photography. Around 1960, George Eastman bought a lot of her work, enabling her to travel in Europe again, working on a project that came to completion only shortly before her death in 1976. After 90 is an anthology of portraits of Europeans over the age of 90.
"All the time she was still a very active part of the Northern Californian arts community. She continued to teach on and off. The subject of Phoenix Recumbent (1968), in which a young woman's hair becomes a huge spiral form, not unlike one of her floral compositions, was a student, and the image captures the counter-cultural aspirations of the 1960s," says Lunsford. She relates it directly to the swirling forms in a photograph made 40 years earlier, Two Sisters, with two of her Mills College students as subjects.
A Guggenheim Award in 1970 enabled her to start work on establishing an archive of her photographs, a project that eventually became the Imogen Cunningham Trust. "It sounds a bit formidable," Lunsford notes, "but it's still basically family. Amazingly, the family now has the same mixture of scientific and artistic temperaments as she and Roi." Roi and, subsequently, one of their sons printed her photographs for many years. Now the task has passed onto her grandson, Joshua. The Cobh exhibition is the first time that digital prints (in archival ink on Arches hot press fine art paper), have been exhibited in numbers. "It took a long time to get it right," says Lunsford. The hope is that the process will make Cunningham's work available at affordable prices.
The prints can also be made on a larger scale than heretofore. "Some purists might protest, but the fact is that Imogen was an innovator herself, she constantly experimented and was open to change. And she wanted her work to be seen," says Lunsford. "She had a Chinese friend make up a stamp that's on all of her prints. He said that her name translated as 'ideas without end'. I think that's absolutely perfect for her. She wanted her pictures to go on forever."
Imogen Cunningham - A Life's Work, curated by Celina Lunsford, is at the Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh until Mar 30. Tel: 021-4813790
