Imogen Cunningham

Photographic Chemistry and Professional Photography

Cunningham majored in chemistry at the University of Washington and wrote a thesis on photographic technique^*1. After graduation she worked in Edward S. Curtis’s Seattle studio, gaining practical experience in negative retouching, portraiture, and platinum printing, and later studied photographic chemistry in Dresden^*3. When she returned to Seattle and opened her own portrait studio in 1910, photography was already more than a vehicle for artistic self-expression: it was a profession that required technical knowledge, work with clients, finished prints, and income.

In her 1913 essay “Photography as a Profession for Women,” Cunningham addressed in concrete terms the possibility of women choosing photography as a career^*6. In the early twentieth century, even women who received art training faced substantial constraints in sustaining professional work over time, including marriage, childcare, studio management, and limited mobility. A stylistic chronology that simply moves from “plants to portraiture” misses those material conditions. Garden photographs, family pictures, commissioned portraits, and magazine assignments all formed part of the environment in which she continued to work as a photographer.

This professional awareness was not an interpretation added only by later gender history. Getty research follows Cunningham’s 1913 argument that photography was a technical profession open to women as well as men, and traces her later participation in San Francisco women artists’ organizations while supporting herself after divorce^*31. For Cunningham, technical independence in photography joined artistic aims to economic self-reliance. Once garden plants, commissioned studio portraits, and magazine work are kept within the same biography, shifts in subject matter can be seen in relation to the practical conditions that made a sustained career possible.

Letters, photographs, manuscripts, and interviews in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art place studio management, exhibitions, family life, and exchanges with other photographers within the same body of material^*4. These records support an account of her career that moves between “personal work” and paid work without treating them as separate lives. The Cunningham Trust chronology likewise shows periods of renewed commercial portraiture running alongside plant studies, multiple exposure, and international exhibitions^*2.

From Pictorialism to Modernism

Cunningham’s early work belonged to a Pictorialist milieu, using soft focus, platinum printing, and allegorical arrangements of figures. After moving with her family to California in 1917, her work of the 1920s increasingly emphasized clear contours and tightly cropped forms in plants, nudes, and industrial structures^*5. The shift did not suddenly begin with Group f/64 in 1932. In 1929, on Edward Weston’s recommendation, ten of her photographs were included in Film und Foto, placing her work in an international exhibition of modern photography^*13.

Film und Foto in 1929 brought together straight photography, advertising, photomontage, and film under the broad rubric of a new international photography^*9. Cunningham’s selection included close-up plant studies as well as the industrial landscape Shredded Wheat Tower, showing that her modernism was never confined to flowers^*28. Organic plant form and industrial geometry were different subjects, but both depended on the camera’s precise attention to structure, surface, and framing. By the end of the 1920s, before f/64 was founded, this approach had already entered an international exhibition context.

Close Observation: Plants and the Body

In the 1920s, while raising three children, Cunningham had limited freedom to travel and repeatedly photographed plants in her own garden. Getty’s retrospective connects the conditions of childcare and the garden to the concentrated development of her plant studies^*5. In Magnolia Blossom and photographs of calla lilies, aloe, and other plants, she moved away from a descriptive view of the whole specimen and came so close that petals and leaves continue beyond the frame. Simplified backgrounds and broad fields of white and black give greater force to curve, thickness, surface, and overlap than to botanical identification.

Working at close range with the body involved a different social setting. Charlotte Gaillet’s study of Roi on the Dipsea Trail (1918) analyzes nine negatives of Cunningham’s husband, Roi Partridge, photographed nude outdoors in relation to Pictorialism, wartime California, and the era’s idealization of a strong male body^*7. The thesis explicitly notes that the images contain no direct iconography of war and does not reduce Cunningham’s intentions to that context. Its contribution is historical: it considers how the photographs avoid fixing the male nude into a heroic or muscular ideal, showing instead vulnerable postures—lying down, bending, walking—that complicate the period’s dominant models of masculinity.

Treating the close-up plant studies as an accidental by-product of domestic restriction would explain only part of their form. Because the same subjects were available repeatedly, Cunningham could compare stages of growth, changing light, and the opening of petals, then choose the moment when structure became most legible. The Cleveland Museum of Art describes Magnolia Blossom as a strongly organized composition of light, form, and pattern because its photographic framing moves beyond botanical description^*20. The very proximity of the subject made sustained observation and repeated exposure possible.

Cunningham also photographed male nudes early in her career, using her husband Roi Partridge as a model and extending her treatment of the nude to the male body. The Seattle Art Museum treats these photographs as important early examples of a woman photographer publicly making the male nude a subject of art^*13. Her attention to skin, muscle, hands, posture, and the fall of light differs from nude traditions that organize the body primarily through mythology or ideals of beauty, and it also shares something with the later plant close-ups. People, however, respond to the photographer through pose and expression, so the sitter’s gesture enters the structure of Cunningham’s portraits in a way that a plant cannot.

In her photographs of Martha Graham, Cunningham worked close to the face, hands, arms, and movement of the costume, and she also used multiple exposure^*15. She did not apply the deep depth of field symbolized by f/64 as an inflexible rule; the method changed in response to forms made by a dancer’s body from moment to moment. This sitting led to work for Vanity Fair and continued a professional practice in which distance and timing were adjusted to the differing demands of plants, nudes, dance, and magazine portraiture.

Cunningham did not treat plants and bodies as equivalent subjects, yet physical proximity shapes both. In the Met’s Aloe, the sharp repetition of leaves fills the frame^*21, while in the male nudes and portraits of Martha Graham, skin, hands, musculature, and moving fabric are closely cropped. The time of making an image changes according to whether the subject is a still plant or a responsive person, but the search for a distance at which form becomes most forceful remains consistent.

That way of looking continued into later work. In the Cleveland Museum’s Black and White Lilies III, petals and stems are organized as close-range repetition^*25. In the same museum’s Snake in Bucket, the same attention turns toward an everyday object^*24. Across changing subjects, Cunningham continued to extract structure through close observation. The sharpness associated with f/64 was one technical means available to make that observation possible.

Working close to home also created a setting in which the same plants could be observed day after day, following changes in light, growth, petals, and overlapping leaves. A method of moving from the whole subject toward the structure of a part developed there. In the Art Institute of Chicago’s Leaf Pattern, repeated leaves occupy the entire frame, bringing lines and planes forward while botanical name and habitat recede^*30.

Jui-Chi Liu’s 2021 article reinterprets Cunningham’s male nudes through the female gaze, early twentieth-century dance culture, New Woman consumer culture, and gender norms^*29. This is not primary evidence of Cunningham’s intention; it is a later interpretation developed in gender scholarship. Plants and nudes are distinct subjects, yet close observation of contour, surface, curve, and tension continues across both bodies of work.

Group f/64 and Beyond

Group f/64 publicly took its name with an exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco in 1932. The name referred to the small f/64 aperture used on large-format cameras to achieve great depth of field. In opposition to the blur and handworked effects associated with Pictorialism, the group emphasized camera sharpness, precision in printing, and the specificity of the subject^*12. Cunningham, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Sonya Noskowiak, Willard Van Dyke, and others participated, but the group’s organized activity was brief.

Research on Group f/64 increasingly resists using its 1932 statement to make every participant stand for the same position. A group study in the Rijksmuseum Research Library considers the presence of both women and men in the movement together with the ways their work later diverged^*14. In Margery Mann’s extended interviews with Cunningham from 1960 to 1973, f/64 appears within a much broader career that also included portraiture, teaching, print sales, the idea of photography as document, and the earlier soft-focus period^*8. Group f/64 was neither a final, unified method nor the origin of Cunningham’s sharp photography; it was a temporary point of contact between an approach already under way and a professional career that continued to change.

For Cunningham, f/64 served as a public forum in which she joined contemporaries in articulating methods she had already developed during the 1920s. SFMOMA’s recent Around Group f.64: Legacies and Counterhistories broadens the familiar Adams-and-Weston-centered account, reconsidering the group as a meeting point among multiple Bay Area practices that included Cunningham, Noskowiak, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, and others^*11. This reassessment treats f/64 less as the name of a single style than as a historical point where photographers briefly shared a view of the medium before moving in different directions.

The group itself was broader than the later image of a movement built around a few canonical masters. The Met records that the 1932 de Young exhibition included eleven photographers, among them Cunningham, Adams, Weston, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, and Sonya Noskowiak^*12. SFMOMA’s recent exhibition similarly revisits this plurality through the idea of “counterhistories”^*11, challenging the narrow historical habit of presenting Cunningham as an exceptional woman standing alone in the group.

Magnolia Blossom and Film und Foto

In Magnolia Blossom, the flower’s center and broad white petals dominate the frame, leaving almost no view of the plant as a whole or of the surrounding garden^*20. By cutting the curves of the petals at the frame’s edges, Cunningham moves botanical description into the background and makes overlapping white planes and the rise of light central to the image. Her plant photographs hold precise surface information together with formal organization; that dual function is one reason they became central examples of modernist photography.

Her contribution to Film und Foto in 1929 included Shredded Wheat Tower, a photograph of an industrial structure, as well as plant studies^*26. The Met treats the work as a point where the visual language of the European avant-garde meets California’s industrial landscape^*28. Curving plants and geometric factories are different subjects, yet the same mode of observation selects structure and controls background information in each. By this stage, Cunningham’s work already exceeded the familiar image of f/64 as a movement devoted mainly to natural landscape.

The Met describes Shredded Wheat Tower as turning the eye that had recognized architectural form in plants toward industrial structures, and it records the photograph’s inclusion in FiFo in 1929^*28. Across plants and industrial sites, Cunningham repeatedly found relations among repetition, supporting structures, planes, and lines. Her modernism was directed toward the city and industry as well as nature.

Martha Graham, Magazines, and Domestic Life

In portraits of Martha Graham, Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, and others during the 1930s, Cunningham reduced occupational explanation through props and elaborate settings, placing the face, hands, and posture at the center of the picture^*16. Assignments for Vanity Fair added constraints of limited time, reproduction size, and editorial purpose that differed from her independent work. In her Smithsonian Archives of American Art oral history, Cunningham recalls f/64, magazine assignments, portraiture, and fellow photographers as parts of the same career, evidence that fine-art and commercial photography were not entirely separate fields for her^*17.

The Unmade Bed (1958) photographs rumpled sheets and a hairpin at close range, treating an unoccupied domestic space as a trace of the body^*22. It is far removed from the monumental natural landscape associated with “pure photography,” concentrating instead on folds of fabric and light within an ordinary room. Across the differences between garden plants, magazine portraits, and an unmade bed, Cunningham continued to ask what close observation could turn into a compelling photographic structure.

Magazine work also required faster decisions and response to editorial demands. Including commissioned portraits such as those preserved by the National Portrait Gallery^*23, Cunningham worked across museum prints and mass-reproduced images, using controlled backgrounds, faces, hands, and posture to construct an impression of a person quickly. SFMOMA audio in which she discusses portraiture and professional life provides further reason not to reduce this field to peripheral “commercial work.”^*27.

f/64 and West Coast Modernism

Later histories of photography strongly institutionalized Group f/64 as a symbol of West Coast modernism moving from Pictorialism toward straight photography^*12. That account alone cannot explain Cunningham’s lucid plant, nude, and industrial photographs of the 1920s, or her later experiments with multiple exposure, commercial portraiture, domestic subjects, and street photography after the group dissolved. The historical question shifts from whether f/64 influenced Cunningham to why less than a year of collective activity became the dominant label for a career that lasted for decades.

Recent scholarship has also reconsidered the language of “pure photography” itself. Ellen Macfarlane’s Politics Unseen does not treat f/64 form as a politically detached exercise in pure visual design. It places the vocabulary of “purity” alongside 1930s American histories of race, eugenics, food, colonialism, and horticulture, and examines Cunningham’s plant photographs in relation to American horticultural history and the colonial movement of plants^*19. The study does not assign a single political intention to the photographs. It adds to their critical history by showing that the modernist act of isolating a flower from its background and presenting it as form also belonged to a period shaped by systems of botanical circulation and classification.

SFMOMA’s “counterhistories” approach likewise refuses to fix f/64 as the triumph of pure photography by a small group of male masters, rereading it as a network that included women photographers, regional professional photography, and later generations^*11. Cunningham had run her own studio since the 1910s, developed plant studies within domestic constraints, and worked in magazines alongside making exhibition prints. Her career itself documents how West Coast modernism was actually lived and sustained as work.

Because Cunningham trained in photographic chemistry and worked in negative retouching, printing, studio portraiture, and magazine photography, modernism was for her as much a matter of technical discipline as of artistic style. Precise focus, exposure, tonal printing, and control of background were required in both a plant photograph made for exhibition and a commissioned portrait. Getty’s retrospective brings plants, nudes, portraits, industrial landscapes, and street photographs together because techniques of observation and printing continue across these genres^*5.

This continuity also revises histories that oppose “pure photography” to commercial work. Magazine assignments provided income, but they also placed photographic precision under different conditions and with different subjects. A moving Martha Graham, the face of a public figure, a flower in the garden, and wrinkled bed linen each required a different photographic response. Cunningham did not impose one fixed formula across every subject; she selected distance and composition according to the circumstances of each working situation.

When SFMOMA reexamines the history of f/64, it distinguishes the group’s activity of less than a year from the much larger influence later attributed to it^*18. That distinction is particularly important for Cunningham. Her modernism preceded the group and continued afterward through magazines, people, domestic subjects, and multiple exposure. f/64 functioned as a historical point at which Cunningham joined others in publicly asserting photographic clarity in 1932; it did not govern the rest of her career.

Seventy Years of Work and Gender

As early as 1913, Cunningham explicitly considered the conditions under which women could sustain careers as professional photographers^*6. Later accounts that cast her mainly as “the woman member of f/64” reveal something about the institutions of photographic history and whom they have treated as central. Male nudes, plants made while raising children, commissioned portraits, and objects of family life may sit awkwardly within heroic narratives of modernism, yet they were central subjects in Cunningham’s long career.

Institutional reevaluation was already taking a concrete form by the late 1960s. The Smithsonian’s Photographic History Collection acquired thirty-three works directly from Cunningham in 1968 and presented Women, Cameras, and Images I: Imogen Cunningham in 1968–69^*10. It was the first in a series devoted to women photographers, followed by exhibitions of Betty Hahn, Gayle Smalley, Barbara Morgan, and Janine Niépce. The series placed Cunningham’s work within the professional and institutional history of women photographers as well as within the history of f/64.

Across more than seventy years, Cunningham’s career joins chemical training, professional photography, domestic life, f/64, international exhibitions, magazines, and later street work. Photographic clarity remained a technical means for sustained observation under changing circumstances. Recent reassessments by SFMOMA and Getty present a wide range of her work together in order to preserve that continuity instead of reducing it to a single representative style^*11.

The National Gallery of Art shows that her subjects extended in later decades to politicians, Hollywood, the Beat generation, and Haight-Ashbury^*3. The plants of the 1920s and f/64 in 1932 were parts of a much longer career whose subjects continued to change. Applying the same technical rigor to different generations, social settings, and media allowed Cunningham to use modernism as an adaptable professional method of observation.