Imogen Cunningham: Beginnings

Anita Ventura Mozley

Imogen Cunningham entered the University of Washington in Seattle in 1903 when she was twenty years old. No courses in studio art or in art history, both interests she had pursued since childhood, were then offered at the university. And, considering the date, it is not remarkable that photography did not appear in the curriculum either.

Imogen had become acquainted with photography when she was eighteen. She then sent to the American School of Art and Photography in Scranton, Pennsylvania for a 4 x-5-inch view camera and instructions for its use.1 She soon lost interest in it, however, sold the camera and instructions to a friend and devoted herself to her studies and her social life. In 1906 she bought another camera, a 5 x7-inch view camera; it was then that she determined to become a photographer. With this goal in mind, she majored in chemistry at the university and was able, because of her experience with the camera, to help pay her tuition by making slides for the botany department.

With customary determination she arranged an independent course of study that would prepare her for this career. Her chemistry professor, Dr. Horace Byers, sympathetically helped her plan a curriculum that included reading, practice, chemistry and experiments in photographic technology. She devoted part of her senior year to studying the methods and photographs of Edward S. Curtis, the proprietor of Seattle's most successful portrait studio as well as the memoralist, through his photographs and recordings, of the vanishing customs of the North American Indians. After her graduation in 1907, Imogen joined the Curtis Studio, where she made platinum prints from Curtis' negatives and learned the practicalities of the portrait business.

It seems important to emphasize the scientific basis of her training in photography, and to recognize this training as her way of understanding how to use a medium new to her for the artistic expression she had experienced earlier in painting and drawing. Like many of the pictorialist photographers, her visual sense had already been formed in these other media. In school she did not study (could not, in fact) vision or expression; she studied instead the chemistry and optics of photography. She chose an appropriate subject for the paper that completed her course with Dr. Byers: The Scientific Development of Photography. In becoming an apprentice in the darkroom of the Curtis Studio she took the next practical step in her career.

While she produced a few portraits of family and friends during this period, most of her energy and interest was devoted to technical mastery, particularly to producing the high-quality platinum prints that were typical of the best in commercial studio production at the time. That platinum was required was itself the result of the pervasive influence of pictorialism. This recent innovation in American commercial studio practice was caricatured by James Montgomery Flagg in the January 1907 issue of Camera Work, just when Imogen was beginning to work for Curtis. Flagg's two drawings contrasted earlier studio practice and Photo-Secession influenced practice. The “Ticklemup Studio" is represented by a hard-edged, shiny-surfaced portrait mounted on a cabinet card inscribed with a typically swash signature. “Blurremout Studio's" production is soft-edged, the narrow tonal scale evidence of Blurremout's use of platinum and the illegible monogram reminiscent of Whistler's source for his butterfly, the Japanese artist's seal.

After two years at the Curtis Studio, Imogen Cunningham sent a portfolio of photographs to the committee that would award the annual scholarship of Pi Beta Phi, the national sorority to which she belonged during her university days. Fifty women competed; Imogen won by unanimous vote. Following this award, on the advice of Dr. Byers, she submitted a proposal to study photochemistry with Professor Dr. Robert Luther of the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, Germany. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer quoted Dr. Byers on that occasion: "She is one of the best and most proficient students I have ever had." Her specialty, the article reported, "is children's pictures, and after her course in Dresden, she will take up Photography."

When Imogen went to Dresden in 1909 she considered herself "a beginner and still a school person."2 She was sure, however, about the kind of photographs she would eventually make. They would be of the sort she had seen reproduced in the April 1907 issue of The Craftsman. “I have never forgotten," she later said, “the impact of the photographs I saw in a number of The Craftsman…It was the work of Gertrude Kasebier that interested me."3 Particularly, it was Blessed Art Thou…, Mrs. Kasebier's famous tableau-vivant photograph, the Annunciation theme in modern dress. The text accompanying the reproductions in The Craftsman, by the critic Giles Edgerton, was “Photography as an Emotional Art: A Study of the Work of Gertrude Kasebier." Edgerton defined her as an emotional artist because “in every photograph she takes she is expressing her own temperament and life as it has reached her through her imagination and through her growing understanding of humanity." The text must have been as revealing to Imogen Cunningham as the reproductions of Kasebier's photographs. Her own later emphasis on the crucial importance of experience, and of expression over documentation, reflect her early thrill of understanding Kasebier's pictures and Edgerton's text.

She was also an avid reader of Camera Work, and on August 10, before leaving Seattle for Dresden, she wrote to the journal asking to be put in touch with Stieglitz, who was in Europe that summer, and with other photographers connected with the Photo-Secession. She did eventually meet Coburn in London and saw Stieglitz and Kasebier in New York on her way home from Europe.

Imogen's year in Germany was, however, devoted to scientific studies and experiments. Although she took her 5 by 7-inch view camera and a small Kodak that had been given to her as a going-away present by members of the Curtis Studio, she made few photographs in Germany. The only printing she did there, in a four-day session before leaving Dresden in the spring of 1910, was chiefly of negatives she made in Seattle before her trip. Most of her time at the Technische Hochschule (which no longer exists, a victim of the First World War) was occupied with a series of experiments that led to a paper she finished in May of 1910: About the Direct Development of Platinum Paper for Brown Tones. After preparing formulae found in the literature for the production of platinum paper, she developed a process of her own that introduced lead salts into a solution containing mercury compounds to produce sepia tones. She concluded that “the addition of lead increases the printing speed and at the same time improves the clarity of the whites." While her method was rigorously scientific, her paper gave hints of her concern with expression. “More and beautiful results" were possible when the photographer coated his own paper, and there was an advantage for the photographer in this individual preparation because the formulae “may be altered to accommodate the characteristics of the negative."

The time spent in Dresden, the “Florence of Germany," was difficult for her in many ways. She was lonely and short of money; the German ways (or perhaps they were just urban ways) were not her ways. She wrote to her sister Pearl about a “beer-drinking girl with a cigarette in hand—Imagine, the lady is the beloved of one of the associates in the lab and that he is holding her glass." She was twenty-seven and yet unable to look at things at close range in a public lecture because “there were oodles of men…I scuttled." Still imbued with family prohibitions, but a bit rebellious, she wrote to Pearl about Christmas festivities which she had earlier described in a letter to her sister Min: “…we had three kinds of wine…but I drank only champagne. I do hope that (this) letter won't fall into Father's hands—he'd have a fit—if he did—let him. There are lots of things worse." Her remarks on her personal life and her associations with several lab assistants are tantalizing; perhaps a note to Pearl reveals something of what was going on. “Your Romeo sounded good to me but tell me, is he big and handsome or small and ordinary with brains?" At a ceremony in January only “a very old professor came up to see me."

On a more quotidian level she wrote to her sister Min, “The Germans have only two kinds of dessert, yellow pudding with red sauce & red pudding with yellow sauce, so I have heard, but I have only had the former." But trips to Munich and Berlin, as well as to the opera and to exhibitions of art in Dresden, redeemed the time. She heard Wagner's “Ring" and Puccini's La Boheme. She saw Old Master paintings in Dresden's collections and particularly wrote about Raphael's Sistine Madonna. She drew from the model at the Dresden Art School and attended lectures on the history of art. She kept a reproduction of Die Amazone, a sculpture she had seen on the grounds of the National Gallery in Berlin, at her writing desk because of its “simple and yet so beautiful modernity." Early in her stay she took a skiff down the Elbe to Meissen, where the band played and soldiers sang Die Wacht am Rheim, “all the small craft were lighted with Japanese lanterns." During her travels in Germany she visited the important galleries, attended the theater and opera and was a close observer of custom. On her way home she stopped in Paris and in London, where she heard Sylvia Parkhurst and her mother speak in Hyde Park, took a picture of Trafalgar Square and met Coburn.

Perhaps the most important to her of all the exhibitions she saw was the International Photographic Exposition in Dresden, which had opened before she arrived. The critic Charles Caffin called the show “the most complete photographic exhibition ever attempted."4 The International Group of Art Photographers was among the exhibitors. Chosen by the Austrian photographer Heinrich Kuhn, the group included eleven American, three British, two French and two Austrian photographers, all of them familiar to readers of Camera Work and to visitors to Stieglitz' gallery in New York. Stieglitz was represented by views of New York and by photographs made in France, Holland and the Tyrol. Among the other photographs shown were Annie Brigman's nymphs and naiads, Clarence A. White's interior scenes, Anne Boughton's gentle nudes enacting “The Dawn" or similar themes, and Baron Adolf de Meyer's portraits and close-up and still-lifes.

Of them all, Imogen later recalled that De Meyer's photographs made the greatest impression on her.5 Paul Shuman described them in the October 1909 Camera Work. “Each of his portraits has its own individual arrangement, light effects and tonality." Charles Caffin also characterized De Meyer's work as having “naturalness and a gentle harmony;" he was fascinated by the British photographer's “distinguished and remote estheticism." In short, De Meyer's photographs were glamorous, and gave a preview of the glamor that he would contribute, during the 1920s, to the pages of Vanity Fair.

While Imogen Cunningham's grasp on social reality eventually overcame her inclination toward dramatic artifice, the beauty of De Meyer's world initially attracted her in Dresden and probably further encouraged the make-believe photographs she produced when she returned to Seattle. On the other hand, she also saw and admired the work of Kathe Kollwitz in Dresden. Kollwitz' powerful social commentary was certainly at the opposite pole from De Meyer's high-style estheticism. It is between these two extremes that we can locate Imogen's emerging artistic personality. She later, writing in 1971, recognized these opposing characteristics in herself. “Perhaps my taste lies somewhere between reality and dreamland."

Both of these tendencies were evident in the photographs Imogen made upon her return to Seattle. Studio portraiture occupied her professionally. Her sitters posed in natural light in their own homes, in her comfortable ivy-covered cottage or in the woodsy grounds surrounding it. The three dolls she had bought in Germany as props for photographing children were settled on a pillow near her fireplace; blue fabric was hung around the room, prints and photographs were in frames on the walls. Her customers were disarmed by the attractive simplicity of the place and by her own natural charm and directness. When asked if photography was “a feminine art" she pertly replied, “No, indeed; photography is a matter of individuality, not of sex."6 She thought that a profession in the arts brought a woman “in contact with the larger interests of the world" and “was bound to have an enlarging effect upon the home." In contrasting the roles available to women, she said:

I cannot see that a woman of conspicuous leisure grows

old more gracefully than does her energetic and creative

sister. This is, however, a minor detail in the consideration

of a profession, for any work which one loves brings with

it a peace and satisfaction for which no amount of repose

and elegant leisure can compensate. 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.7

By 1913 Imogen's portrait studio was the choice of Seattle Society, and an exhibition of her photographs that year at the Brooklyn Academy of Arts and Sciences enhanced her fame. In January 1914 she showed one of her first studio portraits (of Mrs. Champney, the handsome aristocrat who, among other titles, wrote Vassar Girls Abroad), at “An International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography" held in New York. Among the other exhibitors were James Craig Annan, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Robert Demachy, De Meyer, Frederick H. Evans, Arnold Genthe, Kasebier, George Seeley, Clarence White and Paul Strand. To a person who had considered herself a beginner four years earlier this must not have seemed bad. She was also honored in her home town; the Post-Intelligencer called her “the young Seattle woman who is amazing art critics of the U.S. with her continual successes with the camera."8 Evidently spurred on by her recognition she wrote early in that year to Alfred Stieglitz, telling him about her forthcoming exhibition in Brooklyn and avowing her ambition to have her photographs published in Camera Work. It was an ambition that went unsatisfied; in later life she characterized the Stieglitz group as “elitist."

Outside of the portrait studio she “fooled around" for herself, exploring the glamor of make-believe she had sensed in seeing De Meyer's work in Dresden and printing the resulting view camera negatives in platinum. She posed her friends, the painters John Butler and Clare Shepard, in diaphanous veils and wrapped them in kimonos or in lengths of fabric patterned after William Morris's designs. She hired a family—parents and a young daughter—to pose naked for her. They went to the misty woods where she stood them by reflecting pools in poses arranged to illustrate Morris' 1894 prose romance The Wood Beyond the World, Swinburne's poetry or Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. She also dealt with moral themes in photographs she called Conscience and Eve Repentant. In a note written in 1910 she instructed herself to “do one to The Clouded Mirror/ mirrored shape of a nude."

The illustrations to Morris are appropriate in spirit, not literal. Imogen loved his Wood Beyond the World, a romance that takes place in a distant land richly covered with flowers and woods, where nude figures and enchantresses enact allegories of good and evil. It was in this combination of fantasy and morality that she found a subject congruent with her own romantic idealism.

After her marriage to the artist Roi Partridge in February 1915 Imogen had a willing model for nude studies. He sat naked on a sheet of ice by a pool on Mt. Rainier; she called it The Faun, a tribute, probably, to Nijinksy's sensational 1912 performance in Stravinsky's L'Apres-Midi. Or he posed grasping at twisted bare branches, or running through spiky woods, his body outlined in bright sunlight. It seems a far cry from the children's pictures that had been predicted earlier in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

These photographs were shown in Seattle in November 1915 under the auspices of the Seattle Fine Arts Society, of which both Roi and Imogen Partridge were members. A long, narrow invitation on gray art paper, folded once, announced the exhibition in a typeface reminiscent of those used by William Morris. The chaste-looking catalogue gave the titles of Imogen's photographs, including Pan in the Mountains, as well as those of the etchings, miniatures and paintings by the three other artists, Roi Partridge, Clare Shepard and John Butler. Among her photographs was one of the family she had hired in 1910; the father's genitals are clearly revealed and the figures are reflected in the pool in which they stand. This photograph was among those reproduced full-page in the Seattle Town Crier, a journal that had followed Imogen's career with approving comment. Seattle, however, was outraged and made its outrage so effectively heard that she packed away the offending photographs and negatives for fifty-five years.

The 1915 exhibition, in effect, was a summation of Imogen Cunningham's early work. The last show of a pre-war romance, it marked the end of a period. By 1917 the idyll was ended. Although Morris' Wood Beyond the World was, ironically, one of the most popular books in the trenches of Europe, Imogen moved on, to another place to do other work. It was not until 1970, toward the end of her life, that the beginning phase of her career in photography became widely known. In that year she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to print old negatives, among them those she had made with her friends in Seattle's misty woods. What did she think of her beginnings? In 1964 she wrote of her early photographs, “They are from what I call my ‘dream period,' when I read William Morris and thought I understood poetry, especially Swinburne." She described her Guggenheim work as “printing my past.

The Trust is most grateful to The Friends of Photography and the author,

Anita Ventura Mozley, for permission to print this article on the Trust website.