Imogen Cunningham valuation
Photographed plants, bodies and faces for seventy years, and was still working in her nineties.
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.
What a work by Imogen Cunningham is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
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 Roi 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.
At a glance
- Born
- 12 April 1883, Portland
- Died
- 23 June 1976, San Francisco
- Movement
- Straight Photography
More on Wikipedia.
Dresden, Stieglitz and the Seattle portraits
Cunningham took up photography in 1906 at the University of Washington, worked for Edward S. Curtis after graduating in 1907, and in 1909 a Pi Beta Phi graduate fellowship took her to the Technische Hochschule in Dresden to study with Robert Luther. On the way home she met Alvin Langdon Coburn in London and Alfred Stieglitz and Gertrude Käsebier in New York.
In Seattle much of her portrait work was made in her sitters' homes or in the woods near her cottage. She and Roi Partridge had three sons between 1915 and 1920, among them the photographer Rondal Partridge.
Mount Rainier, Two Callas and Vanity Fair
Her nudes of Roi Partridge on the slopes of Mount Rainier caused a scandal when Seattle's Town Crier printed them, and she did not return to those pictures for 55 years. She showed at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1913, and in 1920 the family moved to Mills College in Oakland, where she made her long study of the magnolia between 1923 and 1925. Edward Weston chose ten of her photographs for the Film und Foto exhibition of 1929, where Two Callas was first shown.
Vanity Fair brought her to New York in 1932, where she photographed Wallace Beery and Spencer Tracy, and her magazine portraits include Gertrude Stein, Martha Graham, August Sander and Man Ray. In 1945 Ansel Adams invited her to teach at the California School of Fine Arts alongside Dorothea Lange and Minor White. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970, and the Metropolitan Museum showed her photographs in 1973.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
