Imogen Cunningham - Finding form in everything

[@SlavaVeres]

Enjoyed this video very much! Thank you! Her work was really revolutionary for that time.

[@PhotoConversations]

Thanks Slava

[@writerman242]

Fascinating Graeme She's was a real. That f64 book was riveting I've read it twice Haven't read the Curtis one bui I think I will now that I know the connection with Cunningham t

[@PhotoConversations]

Thanks Mr Writerman

[@uniktbrukernavn]

Seems like a petty reason to end a 19 year long marriage, although after 19 years the glass may be full and the final drop can be anything :) Interesting that you mentioned how photography went through a technical period because that's how I feel about Ansel Adams.

[@LloydSpencer]

While her children were young Imogen Cunningham more or less put her photography ambitions aside in order to be a full-time mother. She talks very eloquently about this decision and dismiss any suggestion that she might have resented this. It seems likely that her husband did not show understanding for her desire to pick up her commitment to work again.

[@LloydSpencer]

« At one point she and her husband Roi Partridge, a Seattle artist and print maker, climbed up to the Alpine wild flower fields on Mt. Rainier where Roi posed nude as a mystical woodland faun. Her images were shown by the Seattle Fine Arts Society and were later published in the Seattle newspaper the Town Crier, where they caused a scandal due to a woman photographing a male nude. One critic wrote that her work was vulgar and charged her with being an immoral woman, but Cunningham stated that, "It didn't make a single bit of difference in my business. Nobody thought worse of me." Cunningham didn't revisit those photographs for another fifty-five years. ». … Scandal happened only when Cunningham’s male nudes appeared in the newspaper. Sounds like réaction came from less sophisticated, perhaps more puritanical individuals. But others had thought them worth sharing.

[@HaroldEscalona]

👏👏👏👏👏

[@PhotoConversations]

Thanks Harold

[@LloydSpencer]

Graeme, a wonderful photographer and a very good video. But there are two points that are seriously misleading. (1) Nudity does not equate to sexuality. This is the period of a cult of nudity and physical culture. Within the culture of physical culture there is an attempt to assert the benefits of nudity outside of or against sexuality and over-sexualisation. (2) Photography was a field particularly amenable to women in this period. At the end of the 19thC Kodak populated its ads with appeals to the ‘Kodak Girl’. Setting up portrait studios was something respectable women were able to do, especially women with the unusually high level of technical and scientific training that Cunningham possessed. Photo clubs etc. welcomed women members, especially in the US. That leads to the ‘scandal’ of Cunningham’s male nudes. You omit to mention that her male nudes were of her husband, taken during their honeymoon and often framed with the same allegorical (biblical or literary) scenarios and captions which provided the pretext for the many, many female nudes popular in photoclubs at the time. Cunningham innocently expected no scandal … she was following a template. She simply did not see that the gender-reversal might cause any adverse reaction. Bless her, she stuck to her guns and was taking nudes into her nineties.

[@PhotoConversations]

Thanks Lloyd