Imaginations

Imogen Cunningham is ninety-one years old. She lives in San Francisco. For seventy-three years she has made a living taking photographs. "I've lived so long and stayed with photography so long that people are curious about what makes me tick," she has said. "I suppose that by the time most people are my age, they have it made. Maybe it's the lack of money that pushes me along. I've always worked for money, and I've always had fun doing it. People often marvel at me, 'I don't know how you keep so busy,' they say. Keep busy, I don't keep busy. I am busy."

Her first photography course cost 15 dollars at the International Correspondence school in Scranton, Pa. But her associates would come to include such major photographers as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. Hilton Kramer of the New York Times says that "Like Paul Strand's, 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. On both counts, it is of exceptional interest." In the past year, Imogen Cunningham has had one-woman shows at both the Metropolitan Museum and New York's prestigious Witkin gallery. Last spring, the University of Washington Press published a new collection of her work, entitled Imogen!. Imogen Cunningham has hit the big time.

But she also hit the big time when some nude photographs of her husband raised hell in Seattle in 1915. Or in 1926, when Edward Weston wrote to her about her print "Glacial Lily:" "This is fine! It is the best thing in the show, Imogen, and if you keep up to that standard, you will be one of a handful of important photographers in America--or anywhere." Her reaction to his praise is typical for her: "Of course, I had been photographing for twenty-five years." In 1931, Martha Graham called Imogen "the only photographer before whom I can create." And Vanity fair sent her to Hollywood to photograph Spencer Tracy, Wallace Beery and James Cagney as part of an article on ugly men.

All this is to show that Imogen Cunningham has been a very good photographer for a very long time. She is a portraitist. In the mid-1920s, influenced by the photographs of Paul Strand, she did a series of intense studies of plants, and even these are portraits. She bears down on a single bud or stalk and reveals the uniqueness of a living thing in the same way she concentrates on a human face and reveals its essentials. For her, Ansel Adams glares down from the top of a mountain, tripod slung over his shoulder, finger jabbing at the air in the style of a barnstorming evangelist. Judy Dater--another photographer--glances down with daydreaming eyes and a half smile as she stretches out her long black hair with her fingers. Her portraits of Martha Graham are studies in extension and complete muscular control, but Imogen captures the dancer most effectively in a close-up of her hands and feet, and says it is "strange and unbeautiful, but very like her."

Imogen began her work in Seattle at the turn of the century, when pictorial photography was the prevalent style. Her early work was greatly influenced by Gertrude Kasebier, and made much use of soft focus and allegorical subject matter. But by 1930, she had moved far enough away from romanticism to found, along with Adams, Weston and other California photographers, the f/64 Group. Named after a tiny lens opening that keeps almost everything in focus, the f/64 Group reflected the depression age's desire for realism, paralleled the rise of photojournalism and revolutionized photographic styles on the West Coast. Now, 45 years since the f/64 Group disbanded, Imogen follows her own whims more than any set style. She takes "completely accidental failures on the Polaroid" and mounts and shows them anyway. She has begun to experiment with using two or three negatives for one print. Of one of these experiments, a self-portrait done two years ago that superimposes her crossed hands on a rotting tree-trunk, she says, "Let people worry about it. They need to worry about something."

"People are a bunch of nuts," she claims, and in conventional terms, she is among the nuttiest of us all. By the law of averages, she should have died fourteen years ago. But she is still among us, experimenting and creating. Last month she was the cover girl on After Dark, a homosexual magazine, and submitted to an hour-long television interview with James Day on NET. But late-life activity runs in her family. Her father began a correspondence course in algebra when he was well past 70.

Occasionally, she will photograph herself in a mirror--in a funhouse with her grand-children or in the window of a junkshop on San Francisco's Geary Street. Her figure is a strange one, a tiny body swathed in a black cape, an intriguingly wrinkled, amused looking face with a receding chin, the light catching the mirrors of the small, multi-colored Indian cap she always wears. "I photograph anything that can be exposed to light," she says, but complains about too much philosophizing on photography. "People will just have to look at my stuff and make up their own minds."