Malaga,
Born in Portland in 1883, Imogen Cunningham was, even in life, considered a pioneering figure in photography for her constant exploration of new techniques throughout more than seven decades of career, since she took her first steps with pictorialist-influenced images. to his most intimate nudes, his plant compositions or the numerous portraits he took for Vanity Fair.
Stieglitz and Edward Weston are his most cited references, but the range of his sources is wide. Raised in a family as humble as it was culturally voracious and trained in chemistry, after marrying the artist Roi Partridge in 1917, she moved to California and from 1920 her interest in photographing the natural environment bore fruit in floral images of then avant-garde aesthetics in the that the motifs were reduced to simple forms. A fan of botany, Cunningham at that stage made magnolias, cacti, aloes and callas the center of her creations, which may remind us of those of Karl Blossfeldt and the later ones of Robert Mapplethorpe and which have their logical extension in the photographic representations of a sensual human body, in harmony with the nature from which it derives.
Male nudes that defied their time, close-up body details and delicate compositions that seduce with their careful treatment of light and shadow earned the artist her participation in 1929 in “Film und Foto”, which is considered the first major exhibition of the modern European and North American photography. Man Ray, Steichen and Berenice Abbott took part in it, and Cunningham showed there a nude, eight botanical images that enjoyed great reception, and an architectural study.
A little later, this author formed, together with the aforementioned Weston and Ansel Adams, the group f/64: it only survived three years as a collective, but its ideas (they defended the direct taking of snapshots, without the mediation of laboratory or development) did not expire. for Cunningham, who did not stop advocating for clear and sharp photography characterized by a wide depth of field and the desire to reduce species and bodies to their essential forms, using light games, all of which are basic features of his legacy.
Already in 1930, he began to use the double or multiple exposure of portraits of artists or writers that he had previously taken to create innovative superimpositions of images that soon attracted the attention of the aforementioned Vanity Fair. He began collaborating with this publication, traveling to New York and Los Angeles to photograph President Hoover or actors like Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy, always ignoring accessory details and focusing his attention on the psychology of his models. One of those trips allowed him to meet Lisette Model and her style of street photography, based on the capture of dynamic and cropped details, would have a decisive imprint on Cunningham until his final years. She died in 1976, camera in hand: while she was preparing a compilation of portraits of people who, like her, had managed to surpass their nineties at the time.
The Noble Room of the Carmen Thyssen Málaga Museum houses, until next January, a selection of his images treasured by José Luis Soler Vila, who created the Fundació Per Amor a l’Art and the Bombas Gens Art Center of Valencia, who died a few years ago. months. They correspond to his plants and his nudes, all of them presented to the viewer as objects of desire, focusing on capturing the richness of their textures, their volumes, lines, shadows and details.
These pieces, contemplated today, constitute an invitation to discover aesthetic pleasure in what is simple and close: in the botany that always interested him, in the bodies of women and men and, on other occasions, also at street level: we owe him significant urban scenes that reflected the brief glow of the hippie movement in the United States. But his forcefulness and his fully evocative lyricism should not make us forget his technical mastery: the chemical knowledge he soon acquired allowed him to transfer his handling of lights and shadows and depth of field to platinotypes (platinum prints), a complex method. of positivity that he had studied in his youth and to which he dedicated his thesis, at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden. Speaking of Germany, its direct and precise photography has often been compared to the canons of the New Objectivity.
The images that have ended up in Malaga date precisely from the 1920s and 1930s; several were part of the album The Eye of Imogen Cunningham (2013) and we can say that they summarize his mature style, when he began to free himself from the pictorialist imprint, although we still appreciate its echoes in the posed images and in that imprecise softness that his early works conveyed.
The nudes gathered together are always sensual and never erotic, they underline the beauty of the body by portraying it with grace and regardless of settings; We know that his models were family and friends and he worked in black and white and in close-up shots, so there is no narration or scenery in these compositions. As a good believer in what photography has as a contemporary language, Cunningham converts a naked woman into a game of triangles, into lighting geometry.
As for her plants, she incorporated them into her production when she was raising her children and the garden was her most accessible motif, although she had previously taken some botany photos at university. He seems to want to search in them for original forms of art, the origin of the world and creation in the organic, especially in the least noticed details; As Georgia O’Keeffe pointed out, with similar inclinations in this sense, no one really sees a flower (…), we don’t have time and seeing takes time.
“Imogen Cunningham. Essences”
CARMEN THYSSEN MUSEUM
C/Company, 10
Malaga
From October 24, 2024 to January 19, 2025
