Imogen Cunningham was the quintessential American woman photographer of the twentieth century and an artist whose expansive vision created many great icons of photographic history. From her start in photography at the University of Washington in Seattle about 1906 to her death in San Francisco in 1976, she devoted her life to the pursuit of her craft, participating in many of the trends and developments of half of the history of this scientific art. Her best-known signature images were made between 1920 and 1940, an exciting period of modernist imagery in America. “Her interest in photographically documenting the lives of nonagerians, her own as well as others, carried her wanning energies to the end of her life. Just months before she died, she died, she found in a convalescent home one of her last great models – an ailing former carnival “tattoed lady” named Bobbie Libarry. Cunningham’s probing yet compassionate examination of every fragment of Libarry’s figure reveals a body physically used and spent, its lacelike tattoo adorments distorted by her sagging and wrinkling skin – a body once used like an artist’s palette that has become a self-created form of real body art. Filed away in her notes and found after her death, quotation Cunningham had scribbled on a torn piece of card could only apply to this inevitable weakening of all human bodies:
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 01:38:15 +0000
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