A Garden of One’s Own

Early in her career, Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976) manipulated her photographs to create diffuse, soft-focus images that resembled romantic figurative paintings. After she moved from Seattle to San Francisco in 1917, she rejected such “pictorialism,” with its bag of darkroom tricks, and began to explore the nature and mechanics of photography in its own right. Cunningham’s botanical images from the 1920s, like Agave Design 2, feature closely cropped compositions that highlight the geometry of nature and often erase any hints of background or context. With their fine detail and high contrast, these works present the natural world in a way that is specific to the medium of photography. 

In Agave Design 2, the serrated edges of the agave leaves, doubled by their shadows, create a rhythmic visual pattern along the surface of the photograph. Punctuated by the leaves’ spines, the alternating light and dark diagonals present a radical formal proposition, a design, rather than the characteristic rosette of the succulent plant. 

The shift in Cunningham’s work coincided with her new motherhood. “I had three children in two years,” she said, “what could I do? I didn’t have any choice; I couldn’t get out of the garden.” In the brief snatches of time while her children napped, Cunningham would arrange and photograph the plants around her. Tied to her domestic responsibilities, Cunningham found in her backyard what her male counterparts Ansel Adams and Brett Weston had to travel the expanse of the American West to create: modernist photography. 

Cunningham continued to change the way we see and understand the world through photographs. A great advocate for women in the arts, her portraits of Ruth Asawa, Frida Kahlo, and Martha Graham have become iconic. Although wary of being labeled a female photographer, it was due in part to her circumstances as a woman and mother that she was able to develop new creative possibilities and transform twentieth-century photography. 
 
— Alejandra Rojas Silva, Works on Paper, Photography and New Media Fellow