Imogen cunningham still life

By Alex Greenberger. Senior Editor, ARTnews. What explains the fact that Imogen Cunningham is still an elusive figure? But at some point, her popularity dropped off a bit. Even today, though a few U. The book was intended to accompany a retrospective that was slated to open at the L. In , when she was still not yet famous, Cunningham trained her lens on a married couple with a young child, whom she paid to model for her.

She shot them near a pond, where they disrobed and stepped into the water together, the nude father guiding the child using his hand as he wades in. Of course, Cunningham was anything but a pervert. In photographs such as the one of the nude family, she was able to create a gaze that feels tender and intimate, showing people at ease and comfortable with themselves.

In another series, she photographed her husband, printmaker Roi Partridge—without any clothes—on Mount Rainier, creating compositions that appear to merge his body with rippling waters around him.

Imogen cunningham botanicals

About a decade later, she created shots of breasts, backs, and legs that innovatively abstract the human body into intersecting geometrical forms. Her photographs of the modernist dancer Martha Graham, shot in , are among her most widely praised ones, even though just a handful of her pictures from that shoot have ever been printed and exhibited.

In them, Graham, wearing muted colors, contorts her body and closes her eyes, as though lost in a private moment. Critics have prized the works for their eroticism. Having met Asawa through her son, Cunningham became close with the sculptor and shot key pictures of her at work.