Imogen Cunningham
at Edwynn Houk Gallery, through March 19
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While Cunningham got her start as a portrait photographer, opening a studio in Seattle in 1910, the strongest works in this show, and the ones she is best known for today, are her plant photographs. In sharply detailed close-ups, the form of each species is captured with a portraitist’s eye for the one perfect angle that will best reveal its uniqueness. The blossom at the center of Magnolia Blossom (1925) is marvelously complex, with dozens of tiny buds and petals adorning its globular surface; it stands out against the leafy white background, commanding the viewer’s attention. Yet while at first glance the picture seems an almost aggressive assertion of the specificity of the blossom’s shape, the more I looked at it the more the blossom and the background leaf started to come together. The various shades of white in the blossom all began to seem different versions of the background white, as if the blossom were a miraculous but temporary apparition only recently emerged from the leaves–a fact true to the life cycle of flowers.
Other plant images contain similar dualities. Agave Design 2 (1920s) is filled with long white leaves making gentle diagonals to the vertical; gray shadows fall across some, but each leaf has many tiny solid black thorns. At first it is the thorns that command attention, their black points standing out against the white, but soon the regularity with which they repeat seems to match the repeating leaf shapes, and the viewer focuses on the composition’s overall unity. Even more strongly unified is the pre-1929 Leaf Pattern, which fills the image with a dense, tapestrylike pattern of dark leaves. Both images transport the viewer out of the grounded spaces of the gallery; one is peering into a lush, leafy world, on the brink of entering a forest or a jungle. The viewer goes from seeing nature’s specific forms to experiencing them as an overall unity of shape and shade, light and shadow, a oneness that lies beyond words.
The two outdoor nudes in the show, with their moody diffuse light, references to allegorical painting, and exotic attitude, seem dated and perhaps a little silly today. Yet the impulse that inspired them–to take flight from the city to nature, to view nature as all-encompassing and mysterious, to see humans within nature–can be found in greatly altered form in the plant pictures. For all their precision, their disparate parts come together like pieces of some enchanted, otherworldly jungle. The viewer enters, and is immersed in, this unified world.
One lesson I must keep relearning is that art’s deepest effects are subjective and untranslatable; it may take many viewings to reach even a partial appreciation of a major artist’s achievement. In this experience of Cunningham I am in good company. One of her sons wrote, “Most of my life I did not think of Imogen as more than just a good photographer . . . until her show at Stanford in 1967, her first big retrospective. I walked into that show and saw the whole circle of all my mother’s work and I said, “Wow! I’ve been underestimating her all my life!’ At that moment I understood what Imo was all about.”
