On a cool, foggy
afternoon, I climbed the path to Imogen Cunningham's wooden
cottage tucked in between trees and plants and flowers on
Russian Hill to talk to her about her life. Herself. Not
everything. Just what was important to her that day. I wondered
how mellow she would be.
At eighty-eight, she has
more than seventy years of photographic credits behind her, a
five month Smithsonian exhibition of her work, permanent
exhibits at New York's Museum of Modern Art and The City's
Museum of Art, and a $10,000 Guggenheim Fellowship presented to
her on her eighty-seventh birthday. She also has a number of
other awards and recognitions (including being named as an
Examiner Woman of the Year.)
I know of her bluntness,
and had read her statement: "I remember I was very ill-tempered
person. I'm much better behaved now, though maybe no one will
believe it." So it was with a great deal of relief that I was
welcomed by a warm, friendly woman who seemed delighted to see
me.
As the afternoon wore on,
she frequently turned the conversation to questions about me.
She was a much interested in me as I was in her. Her
conversation was full of fun, with generous elaborations on
answers to my questions.
When I arrived, a
black-bearded student dressed in a suit was leaving, and before I
left, another student and his girlfriend arrived with a bouquet
of daisies and sat quietly with respect as they waited their
turn.
I began by asking Miss
Cunningham what she thought of Women's Liberation. Hands clasped
in her lap, she drew herself up straight in her chair, and said:
"Well, Mrs. Freidan (Betty F., The Feminine Mystique)
spoke at Mills College. I said to one of the faculty later that
had I been out there and heard her two-hour tirade, I would have
been pleased to give a rebuttal. I think she is going to injure
anything that women are trying to do. I don't believe in
being so aggressive. She makes it her business to put in a lot
of hate and that never gets anyone anywhere. She's off on the
wrong track, but as far as the Women's Liberation is concerned,
all of the women who are interested in it are not like that, I'm
sure.
"I've never been treated
unfairly, as a working woman, unless I've treated myself
unfairly, which I often have by not charging enough for my
services. But whenever I've worked for Vogue or Vanity
Fair, they paid me per page just what they would have paid a
man. If I've not been paid enough at times, it has been my own
doing, because I'm not aggressive. I haven't made great demands
for myself, and I waited a long time to get what I'm getting
now.
"You know, I never had any
trouble in my profession because I worked: I really worked. I
think a lot of women make the mistake of playing on their
beauty. I didn't happen to have it. So you see, if you're really
born ugly, you really have to work. I don't think that beauty is
the thing that counts at all. I feel that if you do your work
and are interested in it, and not just playing up to get some
reward for nothing . . . many girls start that way, you know. So
many of them have no intention for real work. If they were
interested in doing something, they wouldn't be this idle
middle-aged woman that you see every day. They'd have something
they had carried through their marriage. Beautiful women don't
become interesting as they grow old, they become sad, really.
"I photographed an
architect this morning whom I've apparently failed on for about
three different times, and this time the failure will be
because, in his eyes, the photograph makes him look older than
he is. He doesn't, he looks exactly his age, and what he's been
eating and drinking and smoking: It shows up, and the camera
sees it.
"anyway, I asked him what
his wife did, I knew she was a lady of leisure, and he said she
has a very big garden and she interests herself in that. Well,
if she interested herself intelligently in that she could be
extremely busy, and productive. But she doesn't even grow her
own seeds, she has it done."
I asked Miss Cunningham
what had given her the most pain in the past year. She laughed
and said: "Some of my rotten sitters who don't like themselves,
and can't admit their age, and can't admit their looks."
She got up and handed me a
cardboard announcement of an exhibit of her photographs in
Oakland. It was a self-portrait of the artist, taking a picture
of herself in a mirror propped up inside an abandoned store. The
reflection through the window is that of Miss Cunningham and her
camera. "That's me," she said. "I see my picture as through a
dirty window in a dirty mirror.
"When I'm photographing, I
don't enjoy anybody at the time. I suffer the whole time I'm
doing it. Most people are shocked by their photographs. I now
send the proofs by mail. When they get them they take the agony
out of their souls before I see them. But when I see them seeing
themselves, I am so pained. It's embarrassing, humiliating,
destructive. I can't take it anymore, particularly the women."
I wondered if it had been
a struggle for her financially. She said: "I never have lived
without what I would call a struggle. I've always lived poor.
Have you ever read that book by a man in the Peace Corps,
Living Poor? It's a revealing book about what he didn't
expect. I really feel I didn't expect very much.
"The other day, my
granddaughter was talking about someone who was getting only
$350 per month, and I said" 'You mean you make more than that:'
and she said: 'Certainly!' I don't know what a person ought to
get. All I know is I asked for so little from the Guggenheim,
that they gave me two-thirds more than I asked for. My eldest
son said: 'I think they know about inflation even if you don't.'
I've always lived on very little. People have given me clothes.
I don't want to buy a new dress every minute. Some women do. You
know women aren't satisfied with their old clothes, and I keep
mine forever. But I think there is something in not wanting
everything, don't you?"
Miss Cunningham was
thirty-two when she was married to
Roi Partridge, an etcher who
was teaching at Mills College: She had her three boys, including
a set of twins, within two years. "I've never had regrets about
anything. It may not have all been pleasant, but still I don't
carry it around with me. I just accepted my life. I was in a
good situation. From 1917 to 1921 when the children were very
young, while I did it, I knew it was difficult, but I didn't
think it was abnormal. I just thought that was the way it was,
if you wanted to work you had to make certain sacrifices. You
are not a socialite, you don't go out to lunch. Idle women
always go out to lunch. That's the big thing. And that's how
they get fat, too. Going out to lunch.
"I'm sure I had a very
tough time managing my husband, children and my work. But I
never went anywhere. Never. I never dragged my children around,
because we didn't have a car. Times were very different then . .
. .
"I don't feel that my work
interfered with my marriage at all, because I was photographing
professionally long before I met him. We were divorced after
twenty years. I managed both my work and the home
satisfactorily. If you ask him to this day if the service was
good, he'd say yes. I never missed on doing the things to keep a
house going. I did my work at home, and the Mills girls came to
me. I went for two years, off and on, to Hollywood, but it was
no interruption, they got along well at home.
"I had a hell of a life,
but what of it? You can't expect things to be smooth and easy
and beautiful all of the time. It just doesn't happen. Remember,
when you marry, a man doesn't wait on you, he gives you the
money to run the house, but you wait on him. Most men expect it,
accept it, and think it's coming to them and they miss it if
they don't get it. There are a lot of men who are tremendously
cooperative about that, but you can't tell until you get into a
marriage whether they are or not.
"But you are asking me
these questions entirely too late. When the turmoil of life is
over, you're not so liable to go on feeling unhappy about it.
I'm in an elegant situation right now because I'm very good
friends with all my sons (Gryffyd, architect; Padriac, geologist
and Rondall Partridge, photographer), and their wives and
children. They don't expect a lot out of me. I'm a poor
grandmother. I got to see them and they come see me, and we go
places together, but we don't make it an obligation kind of
thing."
Miss Cunningham attended
the University of Washington in 1903, where she majored in
chemistry, and was a member of Pi Beta Phi sorority. She paid
her own way by being her professor's secretary and by making
slides for science courses. She had said previously that she had
cherished learning, and thought it quite necessary at the time,
but has changed her mind somewhat:
"University education is
mental training," she said, "and is good if the students want to
know what they are learning, but now people don't seem to want
to know what they are learning. They think they are not learning
things they think are suited to their way of life. Many people
who get their A.B. degree, don't know what they want to do. They
just don't know."
Miss Cunningham
occasionally teaches photography at the San Francisco Art
Institute. She said that the students there act as if they know
precisely what they want to do. "If you give them harsh
criticism, they say well, that's what I intended to do. I don't
read the photograph the way they do. For instance, a good deal
of their work seems to be a challenge to my sensitivity, that
is, they want to shock me. One time there was a whole series of
people wallowing on a bed, so the next time that subject came up
I said I'm real good and tired of this . . . I said it is not a
very pleasant depiction and I don't like it. They haven't
brought it up again."
Miss Cunningham
photographed nudes as early as the 1910s, but the intention then
was more artistic than erotic. Triangles done in 1928, is
a lovely soft-focused print of a nude showing shadows on an
exquisite bosom. The relaxed stomach is the only roundness in
the picture. Pregnant Woman, a study done in 1959 shows a
young woman's exaggeratedly stretched stomach, huge with embryo,
filling most of the frame. Her wavy hair is long, reaching
to the bottom of her swollen belly, closely resembling the
hippies of today. At the very top of the picture, her mouth,
barely included, has a hint of a smile on it.
I asked her if she had
ever shown these photographs to her students. She replied: "They
ask me, but I say no, you'll have to find them yourself. I'm not
going to show my students anything, it looks as if I'm saying
this is what I want you to do. I don't want them to try to
please me by copying my work. They really don't do anything like
I do. They do it much more carelessly. The thing I dislike about
present day works is that it's a quick record, and it is
careless. I can forgive a little sloppy technique. I don't
adhere to technique being the main thing, but I can't forgive
careless work."
Watching Miss Cunningham
bustle around her house, hearing stories of her daily activities
(the day before, she had walked several miles to complete some
errands). I wondered at her energy level and its source. She
said: "It's always age that bothers a woman, but not me. I know
a lot of people 60 years old who behave older than I. I do rest
and always have. Whenever I get jittery, I flop. I'm tired after
class, but it's mainly the conflict, Talking to people of
various ideas and opinions and trying to help them is an
effort."
I asked her if she was
tired then since we had been talking for awhile. She said
encouragingly: "Oh no, this is my relaxation." She said that as
far as health foods go in keeping her young, she was a strict
vegetarian until her twins were born in 1917, but she is not the
type of person who follows everything the health food faddies
say. "I don't eat much meat or eggs now, but I drink lots of
milk, and eat vegetables and fruit. But if you attribute
anything to age, it is the parents you pick. My father died at
ninety-eight without any organic disease. He never complained
once in his whole life."
__________
Holz, Kay. "A
Visit With Imogen," San Francisco Sunday Examiner &
Chronicle:
People section, (November 23, 1971), pp. 16-22.