Biography (Courtesy of Christian Peterson)
 
One of the great twentieth-century women photographers, Imogen Cunningham created pictorial images from about 1905 into the 1930s, as well as straight photographs for half a century, beginning in the mid-1920s. She was a member, at different times, of the Pictorial Photographers of America and Group f.64, two organizations with opposing attitudes towards photography.
 
Cunningham was born on April 12, 1883, in Portland, Oregon. When she was about sixteen, she moved with her family to Seattle, where in 1907 she graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in chemistry. About this time, she decided to pursue a career in photography after seeing reproductions of work by Gertrude Käsebier. Initially, she worked in the Seattle studio of Edward S. Curtis, where she learned to retouch negatives and make platinum prints, but in 1910 she set up her own portrait business. Seven years later, she moved with her husband, printmaker Roi Partridge, to San Francisco, and in 1921 she resumed making portraits in Oakland. From then until her death, she produced situational portraits of friends, artists, and paying customers, made both on the street and in a succession of studios in the Bay Area.
 
Cunningham’s earliest work was pictorial, depicting nude or classically draped figures in atmospheric landscapes. She presented her first one-person exhibition in 1912, at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. The Pictorial Photographers of America (PPA), of which she was a member, reproduced her work in three of its annuals during the 1920s and in 1932 she was part of a PPA-sponsored traveling show. As late as 1936, she was still making softly focused nudes and serving as a district executive for the PPA.
 
Cunningham moved from pictorialism to modernism in the 1930s. In 1932, she was a founding member of Group f.64, a small contingent of California photographers (including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston) who agitated for creative photographs made with crisp definition, a full range of tones, and non-sentimental subjects. By the end of the decade, she was fully committed to the straight approach to photography.
 
Both schools and museums recognized the importance of Cunningham’s work. She taught photography at the California School of Fine Arts in the late 1940s, at the San Francisco Art Institute in the mid-1960s, and shortly thereafter at Humboldt State College. She presented solo shows at art museums beginning in 1931, with an exhibition at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Large collections of her work were purchased by the George Eastman House in 1960, the Library of Congress in 1964, and the Smithsonian Institution in 1970.
 
Cunningham remained active in her old age. In 1973, the year she turned ninety, she began a photographic project focused on others of the same age. She continued to present one-person exhibitions at museums and galleries and in 1975 created a trust to preserve, exhibit, and promote her work. In 1976, she appeared on the Tonight Show and matched wits with host Johnny Carson. She died later that year, on June 23, at the age of ninety-three.
 
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
 
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
 
Biography provided by Focal press
 
Inspired to take up photography in 1901 after seeing the work of Gertrude Käsebier, she learned platinum printing from Edward S. Curtis, eventually opening a portrait studio in Seattle (1910). Her first work was romantic, soft-focus portraits and nudes. After moving to San Francisco in 1917, she adopted modernism. Cunningham's images came to reflect Group f/64's credo (of which she was a founder) that the "greatest aesthetic beauty, the fullest power of expression, the real worth of the medium lies in its pure form rather than in its superficial modifications." Her tightly rendered 1920s plant studies presents nature with machine precision or as sexual allusion, drawing sensual parallels to the female form that she explored through her long career. Although the picture is a faithful rendering of a plant, Cunningham's concern was not the subject itself, but what the subject could become under the photographer's control. She worked as a commercial photographer from the 1930s. Her last book, After Ninety (1979), was a sympathetic portrait collection of elderly people.
 
(Author: RH)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)
 
Wikipedia
 
Imogen Cunningham (; April 12, 1883 - June 23, 1976) was an American photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes. Cunningham was a member of the California-based Group f/64, known for its dedication to the sharp-focus rendition of simple subjects.