Seattle Art Museum
Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective showcases the innovation and influence of this photographer who pushed the boundaries for both women in the arts and photography as an art form. Nearly 200 of Cunningham’s portraits, flower and plant studies, street pictures, and nudes present a singular vision developed over seven decades of work. The first major retrospective in the United States of Cunningham’s work in 35 years, the exhibition examines the artist’s Seattle upbringing and includes works by female artists such as Ruth Asawa and Martha Graham who Cunningham championed, as well as works by Group f/64, which she helped found with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and others. Cunningham’s spark of creative possibility asserted photography as a distinct and valuable art form in the 20th century.
Born in 1883 in Portland, Oregon, Cunningham’s family moved to Seattle in 1889. While attending Seattle High School, Cunningham enrolled in the American School of Art and Photography, which offered home study courses. For $15, she received a four-by-five-inch view camera and a study guide in the mail. The photographs she took with this camera were the start of Cunningham’s 70-year career.
One of her first successful photographs was a nude self-portrait, created as a University of Washington student. At the time, nude studies were predominantly made by men. Nine years later, Cunningham earned some notoriety exploring feminine desire in a series of nude photographs of her husband, Roi Partridge on Mt. Rainier. Throughout her career, Cunningham photographed the nude human form, sometimes abstracted and sometimes clearly defining the sexuality of her subjects.
Over the course of two years, Cunningham worked as an assistant in a Seattle portrait studio, where she gained valuable artistic and practical experience. During this time, she developed a distinctive style inspired by Pictorialism and the Pacific Northwest landscape. In 1910 Cunningham opened her own studio in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood specializing in artistic portraiture. She ran this successful photography business for six years before moving to San Francisco.
After having three children in two years and moving to San Francisco in 1917, Cunningham’s style shifted. She began photographing plants in her garden out of a need to have subjects close to home as a new mother. Some of her best-known images come from this period during which Cunningham abstracted the natural world and offered a unique way of seeing through the art of photography.
As her photographs gained attention, Cunningham began collaborating with California-based camera artists — Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, among others — and adopted the sharp modernist aesthetic for which she became best known. Some of these images are highly regarded in the history of photography. These include her portraits of woman artists that Cunningham championed. Her striking portraits generated editorial assignments. She famously told an editor at Vanity Fair that she wished to make portraits of ugly men. Her photographs of Hollywood’s elite included the actors James Cagney, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy.
Cunningham’s photographs of San Francisco’s Fillmore district made in the 1930s and ’40s were avant-garde at the time. Cunningham was uncomfortable confronting candid subjects with her camera and occasionally used windows or bent over, pretending to be searching for something in her bag to hide her camera. Her optimistic portrayals of Black life and other street photography earned her recognition from the National Urban League in 1961.
As a founding member of the informal Group f/64, Cunningham was associated with objective, modernist West Coast photographers. Photographs by the artists in this group can be seen in one of the galleries, including works by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Sonya Noskowiak. The group’s name derives from the smallest aperture then available on a large-format camera lens, which provided the greatest depth of field and sharpest detail. Cunningham was supportive of the group’s purist philosophy, though she continued to experiment with multiple imagery, double exposures, and negative prints.
On view in the exhibition for the first time in Seattle are seven sculptures by Cunningham’s close friend and regular subject in the 1950s and ’60s, Ruth Asawa. Their careers became inextricably linked as Cunningham’s photos of Asawa’s sculptures gained attention for the artistic pursuits of both women. Seattle Art Museum will be the only venue to exhibit these works. Examples of works by other woman artists that Cunningham supported through photography will also be on view, such as a video of dancer Martha Graham, and ceramic work by Laura Andreson.
The last decade of Cunningham’s life was active and fruitful. She taught, organized an archive of her work, was awarded a Gugenheim grant, and released a book through University of Washington Press. At age 92 Cunningham started a new portrait project, photographing people of advanced age with the intent to include them in a publication that she would call After Ninety. The collection was eventually published the year after Cunningham’s death, a testament to this artist’s endless ideas and output.
This exhibition is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
