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HIsTorIcal Essay

Imogens Version
by Charles Reinhardt

In childhood, the conversation of adults carries weight that has no analogue later in life. Whether you are actively straining to understand or just absently absorbing what you hear, the voices of grown-ups fill your ears with heavy pronouncements whose contexts are always out of reach. Names of people and places take on a special cast as they are repeated around you, much in the way those of the rich and powerful do in adult life. Throughout my childhood, the name Imogen Cunningham carried this kind of weight. Every family has its own heirlooms and emblems and mine is no different. Whenever I took trips to the United States to visit my fathers family, I inevitably found myself in living rooms adorned with Cunninghams work. I would gaze upward curiously at the images encased in the thin wooden frames hanging flush on the wall of my grandparents Palo Alto retirement home. Later, after my grandparents passed away, some of these photos migrated to the walls of my home in Toronto. Again and again in the different locations of my early youth, my parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents would point up to those crisp black-and-white images with expectant insistence, saying that this was a picture taken by Imogen Cunningham for this or that member of my family. They never thought to explain who she was; instead, they would simply describe the circumstances in which the photo was taken. Their assumption that this was self-evidently important was what made the biggest impression on me. But the photos themselves played a role as well; Imogens style makes her subjectsCary Grant, a member of my family, an upside-down coffee potseem significant.

Jean and Jinny Carleton, 1936

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The first photo of hers I remember is called Jean and Ginny Carleton. It captures my grandmother and great aunt in their twenties in staged poses of contemplation. Like many of her most celebrated pieces, the photo is characterized by a vivid chiaroscuro, a contrast of light and dark that brings out the contours of their faces. My great aunt is in the center of the frame, looking directly at the camera; my grandmother, Ginny, looks toward the lower left corner of the frame, her face in profile bearing a smile just perceptible at the corner of her mouth. I remember the first time I saw this photo because it was one of the first moments I realized that my grandmother had once been someone else entirely; in the photo shes as beautiful as Ingrid Bergman. Cunningham extends a similar vibrancy even to the inanimate objects of The Unmade Bed, a print of which Imogen gifted to my father when he was in college. In an often-repeated anecdote, she apparently quipped, You want a pin-up? Ill give you a pin-up, when she offered it to him, making a pun out of the womens hairpins suggestively resting beside the rumpled sheets in the photos. There is a strong sense of affection and reverence for the hairpins evoked by the illumination of the small spread of bare mattress on which they lay. By composing the image in this way, Cunningham endows these modest objects with a kind of universal significance against this glowing background. This strange balance supplies the poignancy that her work has always evoked in its admirers, the subtle sense that the ordinary is being faithfully transmitted while also being mythologized. I couldnt help but invent stories about the objects and individuals depicted in her work, all the while knowing that what I was seeing was a reimagining of the mundane realities of people I knew and loved. Imogen Cunningham was born in Portland, Oregon in 1883. She was captivated by photography at an early age and bought her first camera in 1901. Despite her parents dismissal of the art form as impractical, she pursued it at the University of Washington, taking chemistry courses as an indirect way to further her photographic studies. Once there, she paid her tuition by taking photos of plants for the botany department. Later, she helped develop photos on platinum paper for Edward S. Curtis in Seattle. She opened a studio in Seattle at the age of twentyseven and had her first exhibition four years later. Her work was strongly influenced by the portrait photographer Gertrude Kasebier, whose pictures she first saw in a magazine called The Craftsman. Imogens style at that time was of a piece with the prevailing trends in the still-nascent art of photography, composed of romantic, softly lit images exemplified by her well-received 1915 landscape photo On Mt. Rainier. As a child, I called this photo the fuzzy hill there is a soft-edged quality to the planes and angles of the hillside that approximate brush strokes. This style, known as pictorialism, was a self-conscious attempt to inject Impressionist techniques from the world of painting into the technicalalmost clinicalrealm of photography.
The Unmade Bed, 1957

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That same year, Cunningham married an artist named Roi Partridge. For the next five years, Imogen was more or less confined indoors by her duties as a wife and mother of three children. The tension between her artistic ambitions and her husbands demands would last until their divorce over a decade later. In 1917, they moved to San Francisco. Three years after their arrival, Partridge was offered a job at Mills College, a small womens school in Oakland whose president was my great grandmother, Aurelia Reinhardt. In 1932, Imogen helped found a new artistic collective, f/64. The name was a reference to the smallest possible aperture setting on a large format camera, Use of f/64 creates sharp images instead of the hazy shapes of pictorialism. They produced their prints on smooth paper, working to achieve the maximum range of tones between black and white. This change of emphasis toward detail and precision was deliberately nurtured within the group in defiance of the prevailing styles from the East Coast that they saw as inhibitive. Alongside Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, she and her group sought a modernist and naturalistic aesthetic. Imogens reputation as a masterful portraitist made her a favorite among Hollywood icons and writers. She became a fixture within Californias artistic and literary scenes. She became known for her portraits of actors and icons like Cary Grant, Frida Kahlo, James Cagney, Gertrude Stein and W. Somerset Maugham. Her works eventual intersection with celebrity culture seemed to compliment the ground-breaking techniques of the school to which she belonged. Whereas pictorialism dealt primarily in the symbols and re-appropriated techniques of Impressionist painting, the detailed and dynamic style pioneered by f/64 complimented the new, vital and exciting mythology of Hollywood and Beat iconography. Though her photography is often described as realist, the photos were usually carefully staged and required hours of preparation. As the decades wore on, Imogens reputation grew as a street photographer and celebrity portraitistbut she maintained her preference for artless photographic subjects, seeking those who would let her pose them without struggle. Late in life she famously claimed that she preferred to photograph ugly men because they arent so vain and they dont complain. As her profile grew, so did her access to the rich and famous who sought her out for her talent and taste. In addition to her work with celebrities, she increasingly hired her services out to local San Francisco families, mine included. Due in part to his famous academic mother and his medical practice, my grandfather and his wife were known in their community and became close friends with Imogen after hiring her for some family portraits. My father and his three siblings were each the subject of individual photo albums from her when they were in their infancy and my grandmother took

photography lessons from her for many years. In this way, the narrative I was taught about my family was punctuated by the images Imogen crafted. I cant even picture the stories of some of my relatives without imagining the world as a series of precise, still images. It is one thing to appreciate an artists work when the subjects are removed from your own life. But seeing your own family in an artists work even a small number of times permanently impacts how you regard the rest of her output. Your immediate life becomes intertwined with the heightened reality of the art. To a kid with an obsessive and active imagination, Imogens work became a portal into a separate hypnotic world. The contrast of light and dark produces an inherent drama and pathos in her photos that I still find hard to describe. Perhaps its that the well-lighted areas in the frame almost appear to be under a spotlight, as though they were being given the star treatment. That Imogen gave this kind of attention to celebrities as well as still-life objects and my relatives provoked an emotional response in me that fell somewhere between pride and melancholy. Once when Imogen was visiting my parents in Toronto, she did a portrait of my father in an alley off Dundas Street. She specifically told my father not to smile or acknowledge the camera. In the photo my father looks incredibly young, a handsome mustachioed hippie whose natural ebullience remains perceptible despite the grey and shadowy tone of the overall image. It appears to be a candid scene, but my father acknowledged to me years later that the photo had taken a while to put together. Imogen prided herself on a kind of spontaneity in her selection of photographic subjects. She expressed admiration for CartierBresson, who stole pictures from his subjects, capturing their character before they had a chance to arrange themselves for the photo, yet her pictures were impeccably composed. Because of the care she took, her portraits are captivating in an utterly enigmatic way. They are clearly staged, but her subjects personalities are never as exaggerated as they would be in what she called commercial photography. She always demanded that photos be taken when their subjects were in the moment. But this statement underscores the contradiction of her work: The captured moment is actually fiction, built from a long accumulated process of work that remains invisible to the viewer. As a child, this contradiction was as imperceptible to me as the passage of time itself. By all of my familys accounts, Imogen was sweet and self-effacing, though quietly stubborn and determined to pursue her own vision for the sake of her own satisfaction. When asked late in life how she dealt with criticism of her work, she replied: If anyone I ever photographed disliked my work Id throw it in the waste basket in front of them and say nothing. I will not defend anything . . . Wait a hundred years. Youll never hear of

Alfred Stieglitz, Photographer, At His Desk, 1934

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me then. The scene will be relieved of one object more. But her efforts continued to pay off in her lifetime, and she was offered by Ansel Adams a faculty position at the California School of Fine Arts in 1945. This led to a later post at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she worked until retirement. In her best photosAlfred Stieglitz, Photographer at His Desk, for exampleher camera records numerous details of the person caught within its lens, from the veins in his hands to the texture of his wool cardigan. Stieglitz, the foremost proponent of pictorialism in the early twentieth century, ironically served as the subject for a photo that demonstrated how much farther the art of photography could go as a medium in its own right. The furrow of his brow, the texture of his blazer and the thinness of his hair are all faithfully captured. And yet the shadows cling to the side of his face like the mood lighting from a noir film, and the hollows of his eyes obscure his humanity as much as the well-lit areas of the photo bring it into relief. The same equilibrium is maintained in 1958s Age and Its Symbols. In a series whose theme dominated the rest of her work, Imogen explored the passage of time by photographing the serene face of Ida C. Pabst in breathtaking detail, depicting her as a living embodiment of the wisdom and vicissitudes of age. Imogens techniques borrowed from the language of film rather than painting, and, like a director, she made you feel something for her characters. Despite being cast as themselves, they were playing roles for the camera. Imogens unmistakable style built an elegant black-and-white world in my mind where compelling, dramatic characters lived and breathed. Looking at them now, Im still struck by the force of her images. The subjects are all captured in seemingly ordinary poses and settings, and yet are possessed of immeasurable dignity. I have many conceptions of the reality my family inhabited before I was born, but I will always like Imogens version best.

On Mount Rainier, 1912 Age and Its Symbols, 1958 Images Courtesy of the Imogen Cunningham Trust

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