Like
Benny Bufano, Imogen Cunningham
created a personality that was larger than her art. Her image
was an irresistible mixture of sugar and spice and piss and
vinegar: a nonagenarian gamin who dressed like a Victorian
hippie, skewered pretension and phoniness with a quick and
caustic wit, kept working until the week before she died (in
1976, at the age of ninety-three) --- and, of course, had spent
all of her adult life as a photographer.
This role as a
photographer was an essential part of the Cunningham image, the
cachet to the rest, but it was pretty much taken for granted.
Cunningham --- it is still tempting to call her simply Imogen,
such was the force and charm of her personality --- might
herself tell you, as she sometimes did, that her principal
distinction was having lived "longer than most other
photographers." Still, it was generally more or less assumed
that anyone who had been involved with photography as long as
she, how had been associated with the Westons, with Ansel Adams
and Wynn Bullock, who had photographed Alfred Stieglitz and
Minor White, was an artist to be reckoned with in their company.
One might hope, now that a
few years have elapsed since her death, the effort could begin
to disentangle the Cunningham legacy from the Cunningham legend.
Perhaps a clearer picture of her achievement will emerge before
the current Cunningham centennial observances have ended
(smaller shows will be opening later at Focus Gallery,
Camerawork and the San Francisco Art Institute). But it does not
at all come into focus in this exhibition where it might count
the most: a big, one-hundred-print survey organized by the
American Federation of Arts, which will go on the road for three
years after its opening run at the California Academy of
Sciences.
Drawn from private and
public collections, the one hundred prints are all Cunningham's
own and are mostly "vintage" --- contemporary with the date the
negatives were first developed. This is the source of a number
of small revelations. Differences in tone and contrast transform
images one is accustomed to seeing only in reproduction, if at
all (Some pictures have not been displayed before), into almost
entirely different photographic statements.
But the selection, by
curators Susan Ehrens and Leland Rice, leaves many serious,
indeed crucial, omissions. It ends up by confounding further
what has always been one of the most puzzling aspects of
Cunningham's photography: that for all the decisiveness of her
personality, or at least, her public persona, her identity as an
artist was always elusive. And we get still more of the Imogen:
a poster with a picture of Cunningham (by Jim Alinder) rather
than a photograph by her and, as a kind of last minute deus ex machina, at the end of the long gallery, a monitor
that plays videotapes of Cunningham's appearance on the Johnny
Carson show.
This was, avowedly, not
the organizers' intent. In fact, Ehrens said, one of their
principle aims was "to Rescue" Cunningham's accomplishments as
an artist from her reputation "as a crazy little old lady." They
cannot be faulted for conscientiousness. They have gone about
this task with the rectitude characteristic of the professional
art historian: that is, with lots of rigor, and almost no
imagination.
Thus the show begins with
a selection of platinum prints from Cunningham's earliest years
as a photographer of landscapes and campy sylvan allegories in
the gauzy, "Pictorialist" style that defined Art Photography in
the first two decades of the century. As the definition of Art
Photography shifted in the 1920s to the more formal, sharply
focused and abstract approach of
Edward Weston and the f/64
group --- of which Cunningham was, of course, a charter member
--- we are given her Banana Plant, Iris, Magnolia Blossom and
Callas and the nudes and
fragments of torsos and breasts.
There are, of course, the
portraits that form one of the recurrent themes of Cunningham's
career: the haunting picture of Frida Kahlo; a wonderful pair of
Stieglitz, one looking defiantly upright, the other warmer and
more at ease, as though Cunningham had just told a funny story.
But there are none of the
superb photographs from Cunningham's later years which, in a
sense, come close to photojournalism: the unforgettable study of
the Coffee Gallery in late 1950s North Beach; the dispassionate
but penetrating views of the late 1960s Haight-Ashbury; the
probing, deeply compassionate, if not closely focused, portraits
of old people of her series After Ninety.
Instead, the show closes
out with a group of Cunningham's late double-image portraits and
another of her still-life setups of dismembered dolls. Never
mind that most of those faces seen through leaves seem
contrived, or that the doll pictures add nothing to what
Surrealist photographers have been doing with dolls since the
1930s
--- such experiments are the hallmark of the Art Photography.
There is certainly nothing
in this that falsifies the historic record. Cunningham was
proficient in virtually everything she put her hand, or lens, to
and there are memorable images here from practically every phase
of her career: the jewel-like Snake in the Bucket; the
formal geometry of Triangle and Fageol Ventilators,
which demonstrate Cunningham's interest in the Constructive
photographers active in Germany between the two world wars; a
few of the plant forms from the turn of the 1930s, especially
those that she transformed into almost calligraphic silhouettes;
a few of the nudes which, like Weston's, are never abstracted to
the point they lose their flesh-and-blood sensuality.
But the emphasis that Rice
and Ehrens have put on this aspect of her work is, I think,
misleading and in the end even self-defeating. Ehrens says a
biography she has recently completed will show that Cunningham
was not "a Weston follower," but in fact influenced Weston's
turn toward more abstract imagery. "She did her magnolia
blossoms before he did his peppers."
Well, could be, but Ehrens
then goes on to say how Cunningham was herself influenced by the
photographic abstraction of Germans. At any rate, the art
question, as opposed to the historic one, is not who did what
first, but which images take on a greater life in the
imagination and remain more indelibly in the mind. And these are
much often Weston's than Cunningham's.
"The North Beach and
Haight-Ashbury and After Ninety pictures were
deliberately omitted because I don't feel that Imogen was a
documentary photographer," Ehrens said. But in a sense that's
just what this show tends to make of her. Sooner or later, all
but the most transcendent works of art revert to the status of
objects that record more or less faithfully the history of
taste.
Cunningham's early
Tonalist pictures, like all but a handful of masterpieces by
Edward Steichen and a few others, have become nostalgic period
places, redolent of dancers wearing wispy togas, and
amphitheaters in eucalyptus groves. So, with a very few
exceptions, have her later, Westonesque studies of flowers and
leaves and shells --- records, or documents, of another chapter
in the history of photography and of a certain life-style
associated with Isamu Noguchi lamp shades and shingle houses in
the Berkeley hills and cottages in Carmel, California.
Cunningham was a good artist, but not a great one, and to
concentrate on her role as a conventional Art Photographer is
ultimately to trivialize her real achievement.
This, I think, is found
most often in those photographs that are straightforward,
un-self-conscious and no-nonsense as she herself was, or seemed
to be. Almost always they are pictures of people, viewed as
complex personalities and/or as persons who pursue distinctive
styles of life: "portraits" and "documentaries," if one has to
give them a label. They reflect, not necessarily a profoundly
original vision, but what seems to have been an untiring and
continually self-renewing inquisitiveness. If there was a single
constant in Cunningham's photography. it was this curiosity that
directed it in so many byways, and always brought it back to
explore still one more time the inexhaustible subject of who we
are and how we live.
Thus, the paradox that
this bluntly individualistic photographer was at her best in
photographs that are most self-effacing, filled with the intense
presences of other people. She did not always succeed in this:
even the portraits and the other "people pictures" sometimes
seem too coolly detached. But in her memorable photographs ---
so many of which, in the name of "Art," are not on display here
--- inquisitiveness made the magical leap from fact to truth
that converts curiosity into empathy: the personality
transcending itself.
As Cunningham herself once
described it, in what could stand as a concise summation of her
work: "Feeling ourselves into and learning to know another . . .
. It [empathy] is not easy --- in fact it is almost
unattainable. So in the end the photographer has to be satisfied
with the contemplation of the shape. Even this is no small
assignment. If on can succeed in getting some kind of an
aesthetic result out of it --- so much the better."
__________
Hennessey, Beverly. "The Cunningham Paradox."
On Art and
Artists: Essays
By Thomas Albright. (San Francisco Chronicle
Books, 1989). pp. 164-166.
