The Cunningham Paradox
By Thomas
Albright
March 6, 1983
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 always 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, who 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 or published 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 Image: 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 principal 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
landscape and campy sylvan allegories in the gauzy, soft-focus, "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, com close to photojournalism:
the unforgettable study of the Coffee Gallery in late 1950s North Beach; the
dispassionate but penetrating views of the late 1960s Hight-Ashbury; the
probing, deeply compassionate, if not always 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 her
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 of
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" sometime seem too coolly detached. But in her most 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.
