Modern Portrait Photograph Silver Print Imogen Cunningham 1946 Signed Cali f64

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Modern Portrait Photograph Silver Print Imogen Cunningham 1946 Signed Cali f64

About the Item

Iconic modernist photograph by Imogen Cunningham, 1946, Silver Gelatin print, from her studio, hand-signed in pencil by the artist. Cunningham's oeuvre is of the most important in photographic history and the modern photo aesthetic. Inspired by Gertrude Käsebier's photographs, Imogen Cunningham learned to use a 4x5 view camera via correspondence school. She studied chemistry at the University of Washington and, after graduating, worked in the studio of Edward Sheriff Curtis making commercial platinum prints. Her early work was Pictorialist in style, depicting allegorical figures in soft-focus tableaux. Cunningham met Edward Weston in 1923, and was influenced by the stylistic shift evolving in his work and that of his partner Margrethe Mather. This change indicated a broader reaction in art photography against the romanticism of the Photo-Secession and in favor of such modernist approaches as the New Objectivity of which Cunningham was a pioneer among Americans. She nevertheless retained a subtle romanticism and sensuality in her work. Her widely reproduced series of close-up plant photographs, reminiscent of those by Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt, was first shown in the landmark Film und Foto exhibit in Stuttgart in 1929. The precisionism of American West Coast straight photography reached its zenith from 1932-1935 with the f/64 group, an informal association that included Cunningham, Weston, and Ansel Adams, whose members advocated the use of large-format view cameras, small lens apertures, and contact printing. The clarity of vision and strong, uncluttered compositions of Cunningham's photographs of people and plants exemplify this aesthetic, even after she began to use a smaller-format camera in 1945. Her work is characterized by a potent formalism and an interest in design and structure, tempered by a humanizing capacity obvious in her memorable and sympathetic portraits. The work available here is a powerful example of Cunningham's masterful and simultaneous engagement with the viewer and disengagement with the sitter, which manifests an image that is at both striking in its power as documentary, commentary, index of traditional tropes of portrait painting and photography and a the function of a photograph to exist in perpetuity as both fact and poetry. I personally cannot help but oscillate between extreme empathy for the struggling sitter and everyone else involved, a sort of second-hand embarrassment for the patron, sitter, photographer and viewer and total reverence for the layers of meaning and function such an image, its cultural significance through time.

Creator:
Imogen Cunningham (Artist)
Dimensions:
Height: 13.5 in (34.29 cm)Width: 10.5 in (26.67 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
Style:
Modern (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Silver
Place of Origin:
United States
Period:
Mid-20th Century
Date of Manufacture:
1946
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use.
Seller Location:
Brooklyn, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU4190314792941