American photographer Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) is known for her botanical photography, nudesand portraits.
This publication, accompanying the first major international museum exhibition of Cunningham's work since the 1990s, shows the dimension of this pioneer in modernist photography and offers new insight into pictures that continue to surprise and inspire us due to their complex perspectives and themes. It covers her entire artistic career, spanning more than 70 years. There are revealing abstract shots of plants and nudes, optical illusions created using techniques such as inverted positive/negative images and double exposure, as well as many of Cunnigham's iconic portraits of artists, dancers, actors, musicians and great thinkers of the 20th century.
"Some still consider her as just the California West-Coast woman photographer who made nudes and flower studies. This project aims at informing otherwise and stimulating new interpretations. (...) This selection of 200 photographs, although a mere glimpse of her scope of production, is based on an attempt to reveal the richness of her interconnected vision and the way she approached her subjects. In this spirit, this publication contains a large number of her works that has rarely been exhibited." (Celina Lunsford)