Imogen Cunningham: Ideas without End

 

Imogen Cunningham
Self Portrait with Grandchildren
ca. 1955
Imogen Cunningham Trust


After her divorce from Partridge, Imogen continued to work for Mills College and she downsized from her bulky four by five inch Graphlex camera to experiment with her son Ron’s 35mm camera, photographing locations in San Francisco, along the Embarcadero and Market Street. She explored aerial views of pedestrians milling about the cable-car turnabout, and photographed store window reflections taken in a single release of the shutter, which mirrored the complexity of her double exposures. The smaller size of the negative did not produce a quality enlargement to her satisfaction, however, so Cunningham switched to a camera that produced a two and one quarter by two and one quarter inch negative. This was the formula she would use with a succession of Rolleiflex cameras for the rest of her life.[1]









Imogen Cunningham
Mount Hamilton Observatory
ca. 1937
Imogen Cunningham Trus

 Not particularly unusual for her times nor location, Cunningham did not drive or own an automobile. A car was not a necessity in San Francisco, and Cunningham managed to get where she needed to go by using available public transit or she traveled about with other photographers.

As the Depression dragged on, projects and commissions all but disappeared, so Cunningham actively solicited work and exposure in such magazines as U.S. Camera, Life, Sunset, House and Garden, and Fortune. She began to photograph for Sunset in color and her vivid, colorful detail of fuchsias appeared on the cover of the June, 1940 issue. Cunningham managed to support herself and help out her sons, as she was able, by photographing commissioned portraits, publishing work in magazines, and living frugally. In a letter to Tom Malone of U.S. Camera regarding her inclusion in the 1942 annual, she wrote:

        “What shall I say about such a straight shot, literal Kodachrome, except that it was a JOB
         and that you might give me a little ad saying that I would like more of the same…And for myself,
         I am not like a spring morning—fiftyish to be inexact. Still having a good time of it.”[2]

Cunningham detested vanity and possessed a strong sense of self. Her attitude is reflected in her musings with regard to a sitter who simply was not happy with any of the likenesses taken by Cunningham. Exasperated, she claimed: “All she wants is to be twenty-five years younger than she is. That’s all she really wants. She cannot take time. She can’t reconcile herself to her age. Now, you see with me, I don’t give a damn.”[3]


Imogen Cunningham
Morris Graves, Painter
ca. 1950
Imogen Cunningham Trust

 Cunningham’s work reflected her love of straight photography—photographs that are frank portrayals, un-retouched, not glamour shots. Her works mirror the concerns and decisions that directed her life as an artist, a wife, a mother, and later, a single, working woman. Cunningham balked at being labeled a “feminist,” but her independence and sense of equality defined her as one by default. In a later interview, she admitted to being a liberal who fought for women’s suffrage and civil rights, but was clear that she “never set out to make a political statement. It’s pretty tough to make anybody change and I’m not one of the persons who’s going to do it.”[4]

 

In the years 1946-1947, Cunningham taught photography at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Though she believed in learning photography on one's own, Cunningham taught at many institutions of higher learning in the Bay Area and was mentor to many student photographers. In 1947, she opened a studio in her home and worked there for the rest of her life.

Imogen Cunningham
Bench in the Marina District
ca. 1954
Imogen Cunningham Trust

By the 1950s, Cunningham's work was reaching a wider audience and earning her more recognition and she was regularly featured in prestigious exhibitions. She was also the subject of several documentary films. Cunningham still challenged herself as an artist. In the 1960s, she began experimenting with Polaroid cameras. She published her first monograph, in the 1964 issue of Aperture, which included Polaroid cameras. Cunningham published her first book in 1967, the same year she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1970, when she was 87 years old, Cunningham was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship from which used the money to print and organize her work. Three years later, at the age of 90, Cunningham had two major exhibitions in New York City. In a New York Times review, Hilton Kramer wrote, "Empathy rather than esthetic invention has been her forte, guiding her eye and her lens to her most powerful images." In 1975, Cunningham created a trust so that her work would be preserved, and would continue to be exhibited, and promoted. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Cunningham's work was exhibited in the United States and throughout the world. Her photographs hang in museums and galleries across the U.S., including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Imogen Cunningham
My Father, After Ninety 2
ca. 1937
Imogen Cunningham Trust

At the age of 92, Cunningham began what would be her last book, After Ninety. The book featured portraits of the elderly, many of whom were her friends, exploring and celebrating old age in a culture that worships youth. She was asked how she kept busy. Cunningham answered in her typically, frank manner, “I don’t keep busy, I am busy.”[5]

Imogen Cunningham
Self Portrait, Denmark
ca. 1961
Imogen Cunningham Trust

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1. Up until about 1935, Cunningham used 8 by 10, 5 by 7, and 4 by 5 inch negatives; after 1938 she primarily used 2 ¼ by 2 ¼ and 4 by 5 inch negatives but occasionally shot with the 8 x 10 format through the 1950s.

2. Cunningham to Tom Maloney, Sept. 2, 1941, Imogen Cunningham Archives.

3. Cunningham, interview with Danieli, 135.

4. Judith Rich, “In Focus with Imogen Cunningham,” Westways (Automobile Club of California) 68, no. 8 (Aug. 1976), 72. Adopted by the women’s movement as an example and heroine, Cunningham was critical of militant feminism, stating that “a lot of hate never got anyone anywhere

5. Leslie Sills, In Real Life: Six Women Photographers. (New York: Holiday House, 2000), 17.

Imogen Cunninghma passed away in San Francisco on June 23, 1976, and After Ninety was published posthumously in 1977. From 1978 until 1981 an exhibition, based on the book, traveled widely throughout the United States. One of the first women to make her living as a photographer, Cunningham consistently experimented with a wide range of techniques during her impressive career, which spanned seven full decades.

 
 

Imogen Cunningham: Towards "Stolen Pictures"

Imogen Cunningham
Self Portrait
ca. 1932
Imogen Cunningham Trust

Imogen Cunningham was an artist who never stopped challenging herself, and continued to grow both personally and professionally. By 1932, California photographers Cunningham and Edward Weston were internationally known professional photographers, whose work was shown in major retrospectives at venues such as the de Young museum in San Francisco. Cunningham, however, was rebellious. Her interests were too eclectic to be constrained by her involvement in Group f/64, a group of seven twentieth century San Francisco photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharp-focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (American) viewpoint. In part, the group formed in opposition to the Pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but they particularly wanted to promote a new Modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.

The restrictions, which held to a realism that was born of Weston’s aesthetic, stifled her creativity. Cunningham was adventurous, flexible, and enjoyed “fooling around” as she would say, to go beyond the conservative, signature subjects of most photographers of the time. Cunningham would crop an image when she felt it necessary, and save a rejected negative from the darkroom sink when it became more interesting, due, for example, to an accident during the printing process. Always experimental, she would sandwich negatives of photograph double exposures when she pleased.[1] Cunningham embraced abstraction and, on occasion, one can see shades of Surrealism and Dada in her evolving body of work. This is especially evident in her 1935 Photomontage of Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as her later photographs created during the 1960s and 1970s, such as Doll with Head Between Legs, and Lyle Tuttle, Tattoo Artist.



Imogen Cunningham
Photomontage of Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt
ca. 1935
Imogen Cunningham Trust

Vanity Fair invited Cunningham to work in New York in 1934. Her husband, Roi Partridge, however, was busy with his own work and he insisted that she defer the trip until they could travel together. Cunningham chose not to wait. According to their son, Padriac, Cunningham and Partridge cared deeply for one another, but his father (Partridge) was inflexible and controlling. Raised as an only child, Partridge had what he wanted, the way he wanted it, and he demanded that things go the way he wanted them to go. In an interview with Judy Dater, Padriac stated that, “(Partridge) wanted more services, more housecleaning—he wanted a housewife in a sense, and he wasn’t getting one…So, Roi’s attitude and Imogen’s activities were not conducive to living smoothly together.” [2]

Given his temperament, and the generation in which he was raised, Partridge could not continue to accept Cunningham’s independence. She grew tired of Partridge’s chauvinistic, dogmatic, attitude, and of putting her work and their family second to his career. Partridge admired her work, but, despite being a talented artist in his own right, it was difficult for Partridge to accept that he could

not be Cunningham’s equal in photography. A certain amount of professional rivalry may have increased the tension of their marriage. With her sons old enough to be on their own, the nineteen year marriage lost its cohesive element, and Partridge, not Cunningham, traveled to Reno, Nevada, in June of 1934, to file for divorce. The couple remained friends for the rest of their lives. Cunningham would never remarry and remained devoted only to her craft.

 

During her month’s stay in Manhattan, Cunningham met with and photographed Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer she had met early in her career and of whom she had been completely intimidated at the time. An established and well-respected artist in her own right by this trip, Imogen was a peer and was able to capture the essence of the man in a striking photograph with a painting by his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe hung behind him.



Imogen Cunningham
Alfred Stieglitz, Photographer
ca. 1934
Imogen Cunningham Trust



Cunningham also photographed a broad range of subject matter and content. She captured images from horse-drawn carts in Chinatown, to a portrait of Mrs. James Roosevelt, mother of Franklin D. Roosevelt, at her home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  The extremes of wealth and dire poverty observed by Cunningham propelled her to take what she considered to be her first “stolen picture,” a term she used to describe her particular type of documentary, street photography.[3] Cunningham captured a homeless man sleeping on a gritty sidewalk. He lies at the base of a wall which declares “No Thorofare” [sic], beneath the Queensboro Bridge at 59^th Street in Manhattan.

 

Imogen Cunningham
Under the Queensborough Bridge
ca. 1934
Imogen Cunningham Trust

 

 

In 1934, Cunningham made her foray into documentary photography. Paul Taylor, a professor of economics, and a specialist in migratory labor at the University of California, Berkeley, invited Cunningham and her friend Dorothea Lange to provide visual documents for his social research. Lange was already working in the genre at the time and had begun recording the social concerns raised by the Great Depression beginning in 1934 (famous most notably for her photograph, Migrant Mother). Taylor, Cunningham, Lange, and three other Bay Area photographers spent a weekend photographing the process of converting a failed sawmill into a self-help cooperative, taking photographs of its members and their challenging existence. Lange and Cunningham differed in their aesthetics. Taylor felt that Lange’s working method was a search for emotion and story, where she candidly captured nuances of attitude, character, and mood. Cunningham “set up and made a few studied, well-organized, well-executed photographs.”[4] Taylor’s observation is evident in Cunningham’s photograph entitled, Coon Saw.

Imogen Cunningham
Coon Saw
ca. 1934
Imogen Cunningham Trust

 Cunningham relied on the cooperation of her subject. The photograph depicts a worker, standing with his head in profile, in front of what appears to be a metal water tower or cylindrical storage container. His skin is deeply tanned and weathered with lines that etch the skin on his neck and face. He wears a rather formal felt hat, which contrasts with the rumpled appearance of his unbuttoned striped shirt, open at the neck, revealing a grimy undershirt beneath. The ensuing picture is an almost theatrical portrait of a depression-era man.

Cunningham would take her so-called “stolen pictures” throughout the rest of her life. The photographs, however, would always evoke humanistic portraits rather than offer documentary commentary or opinions on particular social issues. Cunningham did not care to invade people’s privacy by interpreting, or judging them. She steered away from depictions of poverty and sadness, and was uncomfortable exploiting their miseries. With her background in the arts, and her belief in producing works of aesthetic value, Cunningham claimed at a later date, “I have no ambition, never did have any ambition to be a reporter…I still feel that my interest in photography has something to do with the aesthetic, and that there should be a little beauty in everything.”[5]

 

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1. Hirsch, Robert (2000). Seizing the Light: A History of Photography. McGraw-Hill. pp. 245–246 

2. Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: Ideas without End, 34.

2. Dater, Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait, 21-22.

3. Cunningham to Franke and Heidecke, an advertising firm in Germany, June 5, 1959, ICP. She wrote: “I am not so much intrigued by landscape—though I have done some. I like to do street shots and what I call ‘stolen pictures’ such as strange people at rummage sales and in crowds.”

4.  Meltzer Milton, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1978), 81-87.

5. Carol Kort, " Imogen Cunningham," In Kort, Carol, and Liz Sonneborn. A to Z of American Women in the Visual Arts, A to Z of Women. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2002. American History Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?
ItemID=WE52&iPin=WVA025&SingleRecord=True (accessed July 9, 2012)

 

Imogen Cunningham: From Pictorialist to Modernist



Imogen Cunningham
Roi Partridge, Etcher
ca. 1915
Platinum print
20.8 x 15.7 cm.
George Eastman House
Still Photograph Archive

 Imogen met her husband-to-be, artist Roi Partridge, while he was studying art with his friend, John Butler, in Paris during a whirlwind and passionate correspondence via mail, He pleaded with her to join him in Europe, but the outbreak of the First World War forced Partridge to return to Seattle, where the couple finally met for the first time. They wed on February 11, 1915, in Butler’s studio, whereupon Partridge set up an art studio next to that of Cunningham. Cunningham’s first photograph of Partridge depicts him posed in front an over sized etching entitled La Petite Reine, in order to produce a study of designer and design.
 
Cunningham and Partridge made a number of trips to the local forests; he sketching directly from nature and she, taking photographs.  Partridge posed for an extended series of nude photographs in a variety of classical poses and was pictured faun-like in settings of the Washington hills, and mist-covered lakes. The photographs caused a local scandal when they were published in a The Town Crier, that same year.

The couple moved to a rural area in Oakland and Partridge was hired to teach drawing and design at Mills College, a small, liberal arts institution for women. With three young children to care for, Cunningham remained frustrated at the three-year hiatus from he professional career, however, Partridge’s association with Mills College benefited Cunningham, in that he was the organizer of exhibitions for the art gallery on campus. He, with Imogen, mounted a major exhibition of new photography-photographs by Cunningham, Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and Anne Brigman were included. Cunningham was in her element as an artist/photographer who had studied art, was married to an artist, and attracted many artists as friends. Mills College specialized in art, music, dance, and literature, and was home to a variety of international visiting artists who not only provided inspiration for Cunningham, but also became her subjects.

Imogen Cunningham
Jose Limon, Dancer, Mills College
ca. 1939
Platinum print
No size given
Imogen Cunningham Trust

 

1921 was a turning point for Cunningham. She refined her vision of nature, taking a greater interest in modernist ideas of light, form, and pattern. A family visit to the San Francisco zoo during that same year produced a series of zebra studies, which defined the natural black and white abstraction of the animal. Cunningham’s portraits of this period reflect her move from the long view to the close-up as she composed tight relationships of objects or sitters that filled the picture frame. Cunningham’s studies of detail and pattern are reflected in the photographs of bark texture and contorted tree trunks, along the Carmel Coast and the trumpet-shaped morning glories that grew wild in her backyard. The 1922 series of Weston and Mather, and of Partridge and John Butler, demonstrated her emphasis on clarity, form, definition, and persona which replaced her previous use of pictorialist space.[1]

Imogen Cunningham
Morning Glory
ca. 1920s
No size given
Imogen Cunningham Trust

By 1923, Cunningham began to experiment with abstraction, and was one of the first photographers on the West Coast to do so. She explored sunlight patterns that were diffused through leaves during a solar eclipse, double exposures and which married the art and technology of her day. 

Imogen began to turn her camera to botanical subjects between 1923 and 1925 that became increasingly simplified as she sought to recognize the form within the object. In addition, she sought pattern and design. Cunningham would hunt for random artifacts and photograph items such as a drawer full of buttons.






Imogen Cunningham
Buttons
ca. 1925
Gelatin Silver Print
No size given
Imogen Cunningham Trust



Perhaps inspired by her time in Germany, Cunningham cultivated her interest in German culture by reading publications such as the annual Das Deutsche Lichtbild, which profiled botanical photographs by Alber Renger-Patzsch, volumes from Ernst Fuhrmann’s Die Welt der Pflanze, and Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst.  Cunningham, probably more than any other West Coast photographer, matched the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity of the Germans with her work. New Objectivity was an art movement that grew in Germany in the aftermath of World War I, directly out of the war experiences of a group of German artists that included George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix. All of them had served, at some point, in the German army and had been profoundly affected by the experience. The artwork is characterized by a realistic style combined with a cynical, socially critical, philosophical, stance. The works sought to show the horrors of the war and its effects. Working with plant forms, Cunningham produced images that were both frank and precisionist in their botanical imagery.

In her exploration of American Industry and Precisionism, Cunningham attempted to reduce her compositions of industry to basic shapes, geometric structures, and minimal extraneous detail. She, like other precisionist artists, sought to idealize American industry in print. She took extensive photographs in Los Angeles in 1928, capturing the oil industry in a striking series of images of oil rigs and tanks.

Imogen Cunningham
Gas Tanks
ca. 1927
Platinum print
No size given
Imogen Cunningham Trust

Weston and Cunningham most likely influenced each other as they worked during the same period and knew one another well. A review of a photography exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1929, declared Cunningham to steal the show. The reviewer felt that in comparison, Cunningham’s work had balance and had included enough elementsto make the work interesting. “Were it not for Cunningham’s revelations of what can be created in photography, we might appreciate Weston the more."[2]

Imogen Cunningham
Edward Weston in his first Carmel studio
ca. 1932
Platinum print
Imogen Cunningham Trust

Weston, in particular, felt that Cunningham’s work was “fine and strong and honest.”[3] Not only did Weston respect Cunningham as an artist, he was also a supporter who never failed to praise her work both personally and publicly in conversation, and in print, as well.  In 1929, Weston nominated ten of Cunningham's photos for inclusion in the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany. Weston requested that Cunningham send examples of her flower forms, but, true to her independent spirit, she forwarded eight botanical subjects, an industrial study, and a nude. 

Next Post: Towards Abstraction

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1. The most likely inspiration of Cunningham’s cropped double head portraits of these years is Mather’s masterpiece Hohan Hagemeyer and Edward Weston (1921) which is largely composed of a dark central space framed by half of each subject’s face.

2.  Florence Lehre, “Artists and Their Work,” Oakland Tribune, October 27, 1929, p. 5-7. Other photographers exhibiting include Brett Weston, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Tina Modotti, Dorothea Lange, Roger Sturtevant, Anton Bruehl, E.A. Nievera, Ira Martin, and three members of the Japan Camera Club of Los Angeles, T.K. Shindo, R. Itano, and K. Nakamura.

3.  Edward Weston to Cunningham, undated (late 1920s), Imogen Cunningham Archives.

Imogen Cunningham: Photographer and Feminist

"My interest in photography has something to do with the aesthetic, and that there should be a little beauty in everything."                          —Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham
Self-Portrait

ca. 1974
Gelatin Silver Print
Imogen Cunningham Trust

It is difficult to embrace the notion that when Imogen Cunningham began to take photographs in the early twentieth century, photography had been invented a mere seventy years before. As an independent woman with strong opinions and a mind of her own—at a time when opportunities for women were decidedly self-made—Cunningham’s life was a complex one. She did not ever formally identify herself as a feminist, but believed in equal rights for all.

If Cunningham was devoted to any cause, it was to her work. In January 1913, she wrote an article about women in photography for The Arrow, the University of Washington magazine. In it Cunningham stated, “Being devoted to one’s work is much like hearing a great Wagnerian opera with one’s soul open. The energy and vitality of life seem for a time sapped but come back in renewed quantity and quality.”[1]

Cunningham expemplified that philosophy as she lived and worked through much of the twentieth century, inspired by the changes she saw, and the people with which she worked. She was fascinated by portrait photography and people, as both nude studies and portraits became her lifetime theme. She photographed everything but, Cunningham felt that "people are always different, they are different every second." [2]

Photographing for nearly seventy-five years, her long career endured despite economic and emotional hardships. Cunningham produced a wide range of portraits, still-lifes, abstract and experimental works, industrial landscapes, and, during her early Pictorialist years, allegorical nudes. Her best known signature images were made between 1920 and 1940, an exciting period of modernist imagery in America.

 

Imogen Cunningham
Magnolia Blossom
ca. 1925
Gelatin Silver Print
10 x 13 inches
Imogen Cunningham Trust

 Cunningham accumulated a number of hard-won achievements, all while protesting that her best photograph might yet be made tomorrow. As Hilton Kramer noted, “Her work has a double claim on our attention. It belongs to history, and at the same time it is part of [the] contemporary scene.

Imogen Cunningham was born in Portland, Oregon in April, 1883. Her father, Isaac, was a voracious reader and was drawn to the ideals of utopian communities. When she was just four years old, Cunningham’s father moved the family from Portland to the Puget Sound Co-operative Colony at Port Angeles, Washington, a Victorian seaport for the fishing and logging industries. [4]The Pacific Northwest region of the United States, at the end of the nineteenth century, possessed a “frontier” quality. By then, Portland was the largest city in the northwest with a busy seaport that rivaled that of San Francisco. During such a period of rapid growth and expansion, perhaps the area wasn't as caught up in conventions as a more established Eastern urban setting may have been. Imogen, young and ambitious, took advantage of the more permissive atmosphere to study at the University of Washington and later, to start her own photography business.

Imogen Cunningham
Marsh, Early Morning
ca. 1906
Imogen Cunningham Trust

 While attending university, Cunningham was free to delve into chemistry as an avenue to photography. She began to take photographs as early as 1906, while she was a student The image she recalls as her first photograph is entitled Marsh, Early Morning, a misty study of a swamp at the university’s edge. The early photograph is rooted in pictorialism with its premise that the camera can engage the feelings and the senses of the viewer naturally, without manipulation of the photograph itself. Her photograph is an exceedingly soft-focus scene of water, surrounded by trees, sans leaves. It brings to mind an impression of an early morning setting, evoking a watercolor painting, rather than a photograph.

Imogen spent two years employed by Edward S. Curtis in Seattle where she learned about the mechanics of retouching negatives, the portrait business, and the practical side of photography. During that time, she became acquainted with the photographic journal, Camera Work, a periodical published by the Camera Club of New York and edited by photographer, Alfred Stieglitz. The periodical was dedicated to the Photo-Secession, filled with sublime photographs, and the discussion of modern art and culture. Cunningham also corresponded with managing editor Joseph Keily who would, two years later, provide her with an introduction to Alvin Langdon Coburn, [5] an important member of the Photo-Secession movement who lived in London.



Imogen Cunningham
Clare with Narcissus
ca. 1910
Gelatin silver print
Imogen Cunningham Trust



After her travels in Europe and across the United States, Imogen arrived back in Seattle with little money and no place to live, however, she was tenacious and managed to set herself up in business within a few weeks. For ten dollars per month, Cunningham rented a quaint old cottage on First Hill that had been refurbished as an art studio. The rather primitive building was covered completely with ivy and, along with several mature maple trees on the property, provided a contrast between the paved streets and modern buildings of the city with the cozy home/studio.

Cunningham took a different approach to portraiture by offering a naturalistic style, rather than the rigid poses and stereotypic formats used by other commercial studios of the period. Most of her studio work consisted of sitters in their own homes, in her living room, studio garden, or in the yard surrounding Cunningham's cottage. She composed portraits with props such as floral arrangements, or an occasional pet, situated her subjects in the studio garden, or against other architectural frameworks. Cunningham’s use of the environment would always remain an emphasis, but most crucial to her was the interpretation of the "essence" of the person.

Imogen was the only photographer to be a member of the Seattle Fine Arts Society, and was a frequent exhibitor of portraits of artists and writers. Cunningham was also obliged to promote her studio in order to stay in business, so she not only ran simple advertisements in local news papers, but she also submitted her work to the leading photographic periodicals and salons of the day. In 1913, Cunningham wrote a manifesto which she entitled, “Photography as a Profession for Women.” She ascribed the lack of “conspicuously strong and individual work” by women in the higher arts to their lack of opportunity. She pondered, “Why women of so many years should have been supposed to be fitted only to the arts and industries of the home is hard to understand.” [6] Cunningham believed that gender should not determine or limit any career for a woman and she felt as if women were simply trying to do something for themselves rather than to attempt to compete with men. Photography, in her opinion, was a craft to which both sexes should have equal rights.

Imogen Cunnigham
Boys with Cut Flowers
ca. 1919
Gelatin silver print
Imogen Cunningham Trust

Next Post: From Pictorialism to a Modern View

For an extensive look at her work see The Imogen Cunningam Trust: http://www.imogencunningham.com/

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1. Judy Dater, Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1979), 35.

2. Ibid.

3. Hilton Kramer, "Imogen Cunningham at Ninety: A Remarkable Empathy, " New York Times, May 6, 1973

4. “Imogen Cunningham in Utopia,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, April 1983, 88-89.

5.  Alvin Langdon Coburn, Spartacus Educational Publishers, Ltd., http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAPcoburn.htm.  Boston-born Coburn moved to London in 1904, where he developed a reputation for photographing the portraits of celebrities such as George Bernard Shaw. In his journal, Blast (1914-15), Lewis attacked the sentimentality of 19th century art and emphasized the value of violence, energy and the machine. In the visual arts, Vorticism, the group with which he aligned himself, was expressed in abstract compositions of bold lines, sharp angles and planes.
6. Imogen Cunningham, Photography as a Profession for Women, The Arrow 29, no. 2, January 1913, 203.

Margaret Gove Camfferman-Early Modernist Painter



Margaret and Peter Camfferman
Photograph Courtesy of South Widbey Historical Society

Margaret Gove Camfferman was born in Rochester, Minnesota in 1881. She first studied at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts where she met her husband, Peter Camfferman, she then attended the New York School of Applied Arts & Design and finally, both she and her husband studied with Robert Henri in New York, and with Andre Lhote in Paris.
In 1915, a year after their marriage, the Camffermans moved to Langley, a town on Widbey Island in Washington state. Their home was called Brachenwood where they established an art colony for visiting artists and instructors.  Like many women of her era, Margaret created a number of pieces, yet she focused most of the artistic attention on her husband’s career as a painter despite the face that she was nine years his senior and had considerably more talent and experience in their early years together. [1]

Margaret Gove Camfferman
First Street in Langely
ca. n.d.
Oil
Sno-Isle Libraries

The Camffermans were among the first modernist painters in the American northwest. Margaret's paintings during that period are vivid and showed the influence of Post-Impressionism. The couple were part of Seattle’s Group of Twelve and were highly regarded in the art community. Margaret was an early member of the Women Painters of Washington, as well as the Puget Sound Group, and the art faculty and students associated with the University of Washington.



Margaret Gove Camfferman
Relaxing on Island Summer Day
ca. 1930
Oil on Board
17 x 20 inches

 At Brachenwood, the Camffermans offered classes which were frequented by many of the painters of the Northwest. The colony flourished from the 1920s until 1957 but when Peter died, the studios began to fall into disrepair.

Margaret worked with the Public Works of Art Project during the Depression as an easel painter and had a solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in 1935. Besides local exhibition's, Margaret exhibited in San Francisco at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition, the San Francisco Art Museum and the Palace of the Legion of Honor. She also exhibited with the Smithsonian Travelling exhibitions from the 1920s through 1956. [2]

Margaret Gove Camfferman
ca. 1930s
Oil on board

Margaret Gove Camfferman
Peter Painting
ca. 1935
Oil on Board

___________________________________________
1. David Martin, Women Painters of Washington,  http://www.womenpainters.com/75th/CAMFFERMAN/Camfferman.html, (accessed May 2, 2013).
2. Ibid.