1909
Self portrait
Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge Heyday Books, November 01, 2002
(Previously unpublished photographic portraits as well as ...)
Previously unpublished photographic portraits as well as selections from Imogen Cunningham's earlier work confront the condition of old age and testify to the wisdom, dignity, despair, and loneliness of the elderly.
https://www.amazon.com/After-Ninety-Imogen-Cunningham/dp/0295955597/?tag=2022091-20
1977
(A collection of the portrait photographs from the late ph...)
A collection of the portrait photographs from the late photographer who helped establish photography as an art form.
https://www.amazon.com/Imogen-Cunningham-Portraiture/dp/0821224379/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(This volume presents an overview of Imogen Cunningham's f...)
This volume presents an overview of Imogen Cunningham's figure studies dating from 1906 through to 1976, the year of her death. Although the majority of the included photos date from the 1920s and 1930s, her later work in this genre continued to be compelling and provocative. An illustrated essay discusses Cunningham's interest in the human form, influences on her work and comparable images by other photographers. Text illustrations include work by a wide range of contempories and the book also includes a chronology of Cunningham's life and a selected bibliography.
https://www.amazon.com/Imogen-Cunningham-Body/dp/0821224387/?tag=2022091-20
1998
Imogen Cunningham was born on April 12, 1883 in Portland, Oregon to father Isaac Burns Cunningham, a self-educated, idealistic, but often struggling individualist, who followed one of those utopian faiths that made people move West and mother Susan Elizabeth Cunningham (née Johnson). Her parents were from Missouri, though both of their families originally came from Virginia. She was the fifth of 10 children.
In her childhood Imogen probably knew many financial hardships. She learned early that "you can’t expect things to be smooth and easy and beautiful. You just have to work, find your way out, and do anything you can yourself."
After some study of drawing and painting as a child, Imogen became fascinated with photography. In 1901, at age 18, she purchased a 4 x 5” view camera by mail order and taught herself. Soon she decided to study photography seriously.
Imogen Cunningham entered the University of Washington, in Seattle, in 1903 and earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. Later she worked for Edward Curtis in his downtown Seattle studio, printing his images of the North American Indians. In 1906, among her first art photographs of still lifes and portraits of friends and family members, Imogen posed herself nude in the grass, in a secluded part of the university campus. Shortly after graduation, in 1909, Imogen received a $500 grant from her sorority that enabled her to study photographic chemistry in Dresden. Her thesis, which she wrote in German, advocated the versatility of using of hand-coated printing papers. She described a new method of making platinum photographs, using lead chemistry and brown-toning them. Her formulas are still useful today.
After a year in DresdenImogen Cunningham returned, by way of Paris, London, Philadelphia, and Washington. She postponed her long train ride home to stay in New York a few extra days, in order to meet Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz was impressed by the young photographer and introduced her to Gertrude Käsebier, a co-founder of his Photo-Secession group and the first woman to establish a commercial photography studio. Fortified by their praise, Imogen immediately started her own portrait studio in Seattle. Its success gave her great prominence among the other artists of the region. She wrote a paper for her sorority’s journal titled "Photography as a Profession for Women." Supported by her income from making portraits of Seattle society, Imogen began to create art photographs as well, usually allegorical tableaux with friends posing as subjects, in the painterly, romantic "pictorial" style dominant at that time. In 1914 she received her first solo exhibition, at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, New York; and a second one that year at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon.
In 1918 Imogen Cunningham decided to relocate her family to California, and her husband accepted an offer to teach in San Francisco. When they moved, Imogen had to destroy most of her glass plate negatives and she carried only a small collection of her early prints with her. In 1920 her husband started teaching at Mills College in Oakland, and they moved again.
In 1921 her visualization suddenly refined her work, changing her camera focus from long to near, seeking out details and patterns and forms. In portraits, her previous pictorialist style was replaced by an emphasis upon clarity, precision, and persona. By 1923 she was breaking new ground altogether. Her images of seemingly straightforward natural phenomena were also, at the same time, strange nonrepresentational abstractions. She began to experiment with double exposures and multiple, montage printing.
In the 1920s Imogen’s circle of protégés expanded, to include friendships with Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston and his associates Johan Hagemeyer and Margrethe Mather. She discovered that the distillation of plant forms was also finding expression in the botanical photographs of Albert Renger-Patzsch, Ernst Fuhrmann and Karl Blossfeldt.
In 1934 Imogen Cunningham and her husband divorced. Her sons were nearing adulthood, so Imogen was able to accept a position with Vanity Fair magazine. While at its headquarters in a month-long trip to New York, she revisited and photographed Alfred Stieglitz in his gallery, and explored the streets of the city, making her first "stolen pictures," a term she used to describe her street photography. This early documentary imagery became a new direction for Imogen that she explored throughout her lifetime. In her several years with Vanity Fair, Imogen made photographs of politicians, movie stars, artists and writers - President Hoover, Somerset Maugham, Cary Grant, Gertrude Stein among them. Assignments followed with other magazines including US Camera, LIFE, Sunset, House and Garden and Fortune.
During the 1930s, Imogen’s art photographs were well and widely exhibited, including solo shows at the Dallas Art Museum, the Crocker Gallery in Sacramento, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In the early 1940s, Imogen Cunningham sold her house in Oakland and shared a studio and darkroom, until she settled into what would be her final address, 1331 Green Street, San Francisco.
She produced some of her finest portraits in the 1950s, a diverse array of street photography, and images of artists and writers - penetrating studies that disclose the physical and emotional dimensions of her subjects. In 1954 Imogen was invited to exhibit work in the inaugural show of Helen Gee’s Limelight gallery-coffee house, in Greenwich Village - the first gallery to show and sell photographs exclusively. In 1956 Gee gave Imogen a solo exhibition, and Imogen again visited New York and added substantially to her street photographs of the city with a diversity of images that are especially remarkable given her age, 73.
In 1959, Imogen Cunningham applied for a Guggenheim Foundation grant to photograph certain writers in their environments; but her proposal was denied. Fortunately, she was at the same time rewarded by the acquisition, arranged by Minor White, of a large group of her works by George Eastman House. She set out for Europe on an itinerary that included Berlin, Munich, Paris and London. The next year she returned - this time to Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and France; photographing the streets and people, all the while. Many of her last works, throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, were new experiments and explorations.
Imogen Cunningham continued to take photographs until shortly before her death at age 93, on June 23, 1976, in San Francisco, California.
Imogen Cunningham is famous for her sensual, pure, and mysterious photographs of flowers and intimate nudes where the bodies of the subjects often resemble flowers. Her portraits of people, including the artist Frida Kahlo and actors Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant and others are also stirring. She also took quiet but dramatic photos of her family, especially her father and mother.
Named a Fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967, Cunningham received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.
(Previously unpublished photographic portraits as well as ...)
1977(This volume presents an overview of Imogen Cunningham's f...)
1998(A collection of the portrait photographs from the late ph...)
1997
Quotations:
"My father didn’t think much of me being a photographer. But he didn’t stand in my way."
"I have no ambition, never did have any ambition, to be a reporter. That is something different. I still feel that my interest in photography has something to do with the aesthetic and that there should be a little beauty in everything."
Imogen Cunningham was a member of the California-based Group f/64, known for its dedication to the sharp-focus rendition of simple subjects.
On February 11, 1915, Imogen Cunningham married etching artist, printmaker and teacher Roi Partridge. They had three sons: Gryffyd Partridge and twins Rondal Partridge and Padriac Partridge. The couple divorced in 1934.
George Roy Partridge (October 14, 1888 - January 25, 1984), also known professionally as Roi Partridge, was an American printmaker and teacher.
Rondal Partridge (September 4, 1917 - June 19, 2015) was an American photographer. After working as an assistant to well-known photographers Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams in his youth, he went on to a long career as a photographer and filmmaker.
