Born in Portland, Oregon in 1883, Imogen Cunningham was introduced to photography as a chemistry student at the University of Washington, Seattle. Early in her career, she worked as a phototechnician in the studio of renowned pictoralist photographer, Edward Curtis. Through her connections with Curtis, Cunningham became friendly with other pioneers in the field of photography including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Ansel Adams.
From 1909–1910, Cunningham studied at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden on a graduate scholarship. There she studied platinum printing, a photographic technique in which photosensitive paper is coated with iron and platinum salts and then placed under a photographic negative and exposed to light. Platinum print images appear crisp, but also have soft gradations of black to grey tones. These qualities came to typify Cunningham’s photographic style. After establishing her own studio in Seattle in 1910, Cunningham had her first solo exhibition in Brooklyn, New York. She continued to develop her technique throughout the 1920s and expanded her subject matter from portraits and still life to include experimental interpretations of industrial structures and modern architecture.
In the 1930s she joined the West coast Group f.64, which included Ansel Adams, Henry Swift, and Edward Weston. Cunningham was also a social activist, documenting the Beat Movement of the 1950s and the Counter-cultural Revolution of the late 1960s in San Francisco. Throughout her career, Cunningham valued the importance of light, form, and pattern in her compositions. Her pioneering use of platinum printing and often of double exposures are still of interest to contemporary photographers. Cunningham, who died in 1976, remains one of the most popular and innovative photographers in the history of the genre.