Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1883, studied chemistry at the University of Washington, learned platinum printing in Edward S. Curtis's Seattle studio, and went on to study photographic chemistry in Dresden. She opened her own portrait studio in Seattle in 1910, married the etcher Roy Partridge, and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1917. The close, sharply focused plant studies of the 1920s — magnolia blossoms, calla lilies, agaves — made her name, and in 1932 she was a founder member of Group f/64 with Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She photographed for Vanity Fair in the 1930s and went on working into her nineties. She died in San Francisco in 1976.

Lifetime prints and posthumous prints are the first division. Cunningham made her own gelatin silver prints and generally signed them in pencil, often on the mount. The Imogen Cunningham Trust, which she set up in 1975 and which holds the negatives, has since made prints from them, and those carry the Trust's stamp rather than her signature. Her early platinum prints are a small and separate category again. Print date, mount, signature and stamps identify the object, and a later print of a famous plant study is a different thing from one she printed in the 1920s. Mounts of the period are often brittle, and damage at the edges and corners is common.