Imogen Cunningham

(b Portland, OR, 12 April 1883; d San Francisco, CA, 23 June 1976).

 American photographer. She studied at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she became interested in photography. She had been inspired by the work of Gertrude Käsebier, whose Pictorial images were reproduced in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work and in The Craftsman. Cunningham took her first photographs about 1906 and became a professional photo-technician at the Edward Curtis Studio in Seattle from 1907 to 1909, where she printed Curtis’s negatives of North American Indians. She was awarded a scholarship to study with Robert Luther (1868–after 1932) at the Technische Hochschule, Dresden (1909–10), where she studied platinum printing, art history and life drawing. In late 1910 Cunningham returned to Seattle and opened a portrait studio. From 1910 to 1915, in addition to her commercial portraiture, she produced a body of Pictorial, Symbolist works inspired by the poetry and prose of William Morris. These depict her friends dressed as mythical characters in bucolic settings. She married the etcher Roi Partridge (1888–1984) in 1915. (They were divorced in 1934.) Her nude photographs of her husband on Mt Rainier, WA, caused a local scandal when they were published in a Seattle periodical that same year. Cunningham moved to San Francisco in 1917, and in 1918 she worked with Francis Bruguière in his local studio.
 

Cunningham Imogen




    

1910
    

1920
       

1925
       



 

1928
      

    

1929
      

    

1957