Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham ( born April 12, 1883 in Portland / Oregon, † June 24 1976 in San Francisco) was an American photographer who is counted among the "classics" of modern photography of the 20th century. Cunningham was a founding member of the Group f/64. Her works show a stylistically romantic - impressionistic view to the New Objectivity.

Life and work

Imogen Cunningham, who initially studied chemistry at the University of Washington, began photographing as a student in 1901. She was inspired by the internationally known Pictorialistin Gertrude Käsebier. One of its first known photographs is a 1905 arisen on the grounds of the University Aktselbstporträt. Your 1907 submitted to the University of Washington thesis concerned photochemical processes. She then worked in the photo studio of Edward S. Curtis, the Curtis Studio, Seattle. When she met Curtis Platinum prints in the darkroom to produce. A little later she received a scholarship that enabled her in 1909 to attend the University of Technology Dresden, which had little previously opened a photographic department. 1910, she sought to Alfred Stieglitz in New York and Alvin Langdon Coburn. These contacts were a new source of inspiration for them. Shortly after her return to the U.S. in 1910 she opened her own studio in Seattle and soon received national recognition for her portraits and pictorialen works.

Later she married the artist Roi Partridge. With him she had three children, the family moved to San Francisco, where she met Edward Weston. As Weston was asked to nominate exceptional images of American photographer for the Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, he suggested eight close-up Cunninghams of plants.

In 1932 she founded together with Ansel Adams, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston, the Group f/64, which quite dogmatically fought for a photograph with maximum depth of field ( symbolized by the name of the group which was a very small aperture displays ) and maximum detail in.

In the mid- 1930s, Partridge and Cunningham parted, she lived until 1947 in Oakland, before she moved back to San Francisco. She worked for many years for magazines, had a portrait studio and also taught at the California School of Fine Arts. They photographed stars such as James Cagney, Cary Grant, Joan Blondell and Upton Sinclair. My favorite subject was, however, still the plant world, but their shooting plants have received little recognition. She busied herself with intense portraits and nudes also.