and Ansel Adams as members. This group was a
very casual gathering of members primarily inter-
ested in realism and truth in their work. This aim is
reflected in the name Group f/64, which represents
the aperture setting on a camera which yields both
the most depth and the sharpest focus. In the late
1930s, she began what would become a later life
focus on street photography as her work shifted to
subject matter concentrating more on the social
circumstances of America in the mid-century and
the civil strife of the postwar years in the urban and
rural centers.
Cunningham opened her own studio on Green
Street in San Francisco in 1947, and for the next 13
years her work was exhibited across America as she
continued taking street photographs when not hired
to take portraits. In these postwar years, she began
teaching intermittently at the California School of
Fine Arts (San Francisco Art Institute). At this
time, she befriended Lisette Model, a photographer
forHarper’s Bazaar, who greatly influenced her
portraiture. Together, the two women searched for
radical and unusual imagery in the backstreets of
San Francisco. Unlike Model’s often unforgiving
and stark photography, Cunningham’s images
reveal a mutual respect between her and her sub-
jects, often the homeless or the downtrodden who
inhabited San Francisco’s seedier neighborhoods.
By the 1960s, Cunningham was running a por-
trait gallery, teaching portrait classes and photo-
graphing the beat generation and flower children in
the Bay area. In her work at this time, Cunningham
not only reveals the everyday life of this counter-
culture, but also considers the role of interracial
relationships in the time of segregation, as demon-
strated by a photograph of a couple in a San Fran-
cisco cafe inCoffee Gallery, San Francisco(1960).
This same year, she was recognized by The Inter-
national Museum of Photography and Film at the
George Eastman House in Rochester, New York,
which purchased a collection of her work. She used
the money to travel and photograph in Western
and Eastern Europe.
In 1964, Minor White devoted an entire winter
issue ofApertureto her work and reproduced 44
images from her early work and several new por-
traits. She was elected a fellow of the National
Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967, and near
the end of the decade she was awarded an honorary
Doctor of Fine Arts by the California College of
Arts and Crafts in Oakland.
In 1973, Cunningham turned 90, and these last
years seemed to have been the busiest in her life.
She received a Guggenheim fellowship to reprint
her early glass plate negatives, was given a major
exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of
Art, and was declared Artist of the Year by the San
Francisco Art Commission. During the last year of
her life, she made a guest appearance on Johnny
Carson’sTonight Show, and CBS produced a doc-
umentary celebrating her work and life.
Although she became a celebrity, she still
worked, and her last and perhaps most intriguing
project was a series of work calledAfter Ninety,
which was a study of the lives of nonagenarians.
For this project about old age, she re-photo-
graphed people from her own past, including her
ex-husband, Roi Partridge, and Ansel Adams. The
most moving portraits in this last series are her
intimate portraits of women such asIrene ‘‘Bobbie’’
Libarry 3 (1976)—a nude of a former carnival
woman whose entire body had been tattooed—
and melancholy studies of the inhabitants of con-
valescence homes and convents, such as the pensive
woman depicted inWoman in Convalescent Center,
Berkeley(1975). Cunningham died on June 23rd,
1976 at the age of 96 in San Francisco while still
working on this final project.
StephenieYoung
Seealso:Group f/64; Ka ̈sebier, Gertrude; Lange,
Dorothea; Man Ray; Model, Lisette; Pictorialism;
Stieglitz, Alfred; Street Photography; Weston,
EdwardBiography
Born in Portland, Oregon, 1883. 1903–1907 attended Uni-
versity of Washington, Seattle; 1909 studied in Dresden;
1907–9 worked in the Seattle portrait studio of Edward
S. Curtis; 1918 worked in San Francisco studio of Fran-
cis Bruguie`re; 1921 resumed commercial portrait busi-
ness; 1931–1934 photographed forVanity Fair; c. 1940
began working forSunsetmagazine. Taught at the Cali-
fornia School of Fine Arts, San Francisco (San Fran-
cisco Art Institute) 1947–1950 and 1965–1967; 1968
taught summer session at Humboldt State College;
1973 taught at San Francisco Art Institute. Awarded
fellowship to the Technische Hochschule, Dresden
1909; elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences 1967; received honorary Doctor of Fine
Arts degree from the California College of Arts and
Crafts 1968; Guggenheim Fellowship 1970; declared
‘‘Artist of the Year’’ by The San Francisco Art Commis-
sion, 1973; created the Imogen Cunningham Trust 1975.
KRON-TV documentary 1952; appeared on theTonight
Show1976; CBS documentary 1976. Died on 23 June
1976.Individual Exhibitions
1912 Imogen Cunningham; Brooklyn Institute of Arts and
Sciences; New YorkCUNNINGHAM, IMOGEN