Imogen
Cunningham
History
Cunningham, ImogenAmerican, 1884-1976
Imogen Cunningham was raised in Seattle, Washington, where she made her first photographs in 1901. She opened her own studio in Seattle in the fall of 1910. In 1912 she had her first one-person show, at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, New York, in which she exhibited soft-focus Pictorialist studies of figures in the landscape.
In the 1920s Cunningham began making sharply focused, close-up studies of plant forms and unconventional views of industrial structures and modern architecture. Concerned with light, form, and abstract pattern, these photographs established her as one of the pioneers of modernist photography on the West Coast.
In addition to plant forms, Cunningham also did portraiture. Throughout her long and productive career, portraiture continued to be an important subject. During the fifties she photographed the poets of the Beat Generation and in the sixties, the flower children of San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district. At the age of ninety-two Cunningham began her last major portrait project, a book of images primarily of people over ninety years old. Unfinished at the time of her death, the book, entitled After Ninety, was published posthumously in 1977 to coincide with an exhibition of these photographs at the Focus Gallery in San Francisco.
Dream
1910
Untitled (Two Sisters)
1928
Three Vegetables
1946
Datura
N.D.
The Unmade Bed
1957
Ansel Adams
1975
