CUNNINGHAM, IMOGEN

born April 12, 1883, Portland, Ore., U.S. died June 24, 1976, San Francisco, Calif. American photographer who is best known for her photographs of plants and for her portraits. Cunningham began taking photographs in 1901, when she enrolled in a correspondence course in photography. Her earliest prints, such as Marsh at Dawn (1901), were in the tradition of Romantic Pictorialism, a style of photography that imitated academic painting of the turn of the century. After studying photographic chemistry in Dresden, Ger., she opened a portrait gallery in Seattle, Wash., and soon established a national reputation. Although her commercial work was now straightforward, she continued to produce soft-focused, allegorical prints, such as The Woods Beyond the World (c. 1912). After her marriage, she moved to San Francisco. She met Edward Weston, and, through his recommendation, 10 of her plant photographs were included in the Film und Foto exhibition (1929), sponsored by the Deutsche Werkbund, an association of German designers and architects. In 1932 Cunningham joined the association of West Coast photographers known as Group f.64 (q.v.). Like other members of the group, she rejected the soft-focused, sentimental photography then popular in favour of sharply focused prints, such as Two Callas (c. 1929), that conveyed a sensuous delight in nature. After the breakup of Group f.64, Cunningham ran a portrait gallery and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. A retrospective monograph, Imogen! Imogen Cunningham Photographs, 19101973, appeared in 1974, and her final photographs were published in After Ninety in 1977.