Customer Reviews

Imogen Cunningham: On the Body

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Five stars is not enough for this genius.Her husband and sons, friends, stide across the page captured with the hand that only Cunningham had.She may be know by "photo-snobs" as a "portrait" photographer but she herself said she alway loved these nudes best.Just as then some are frightened by nakeness - not Imogen.Mostly nudes , herself in a green field, her love on the edge of a glaciar lake, her boys climb rocks. What a gift form above -what a genius unchallanged.

This book deserves more than five stars for the remarkable quality of the images, the virtuousity across styles, and the pioneering inventiveness of its compositions.

On the Body contains much male, female, and child nudity of the sort that would mean that these images would be beyond what a motion picture could portray and still have an R rating. The images are done in a natural style that will remind many of the Jock Sturges work with children and young women.

Imogen Cunningham is quoted in this volume as asserting, "You might say I invented the nude." Before you dismiss this statement, you should realize that while she was an undergraduate at the University of Washington Ms. Cunningham did a self-portrait of herself nude in a meadow. The year was 1906. The composition and quality of the photograph reflect a sophisticated understanding of the body as an abstract shape. Ms. Cunningham is also famous (infamous in her day with some people) for her nudes of her husband, Roi Patridge, outdoors. She also brought a high level of taste to her subject at a time when many men were posing women in the nude more for the prurient interest than for the artistic values. Although modern nude photography has moved beyond her work in its inventiveness, the classical elements she portrays here are the sound foundation on which much of the best modern work is based.

Anyone who is a fan of 20th century photography should own this book. All Imogen Cunningham fans will find this book becoming the core of their collection of her images.

Although I personally prefer Ruth Bernhard's work, the best of Ms. Cunningham's work is just as winning. Ms. Cunningham works on a broader body of subjects, which makes this book far more interesting than most photography books. You will find studio work, nudes in landscapes, bits and pieces of individuals including many wonderful hand images, pregnant women nude, children playing naturally nude, and prominent people expressing their personalities in interesting ways. The book is a fine cross-section of all the styles that Ms. Cunningham used.

The book contained so many images that I liked that it is beyond what you would want to read for me to list them all. Let me mention a few though. A very high percentage of the works involving her husband nude outdoors are remarkably beautiful and inspiring. A series of outdoor nudes of Helene Mayer in Canyon de Chelly during 1939 are as beautiful a set of photographic images as I have seen. The hand photographs are quite remarkable, and will cause you to want to examine peoples' hands for the rest of your life. I especially liked her efforts to create a spiritual or transcendental style in the inventive works involving "Dream Walking" in 1968 and Morris Graves in 1973. These images seemed to foreshadow the type of work in Light Warriors.

To me, the most haunting works were a series of abstract partial nudes of women's torsos (usually more than one in an image) that formed a series of triangles. This perspective was transforming for me. I seldom think of the human body in terms of triangles. The triangles are references to the negative space outlined by the nudes.

After you view this wonderful volume, I suggest that you think about how our concepts of the human body limit photography, and how how concepts of photography limit our ability to appreciate the human body. Why is it that no one does studies of nostrils? Or elbows? Are they less worthy than hands?

Open yourself to the full potential of the physical world around you, and expand your ability to perceive the reality and potential of that world for you to partipate in.

A bold statement for her to make, even when limited to the photographic nude. Earlier photos of people without clothes generally served scientific purposes (like Muybridge's), or salacious ones. The artistic, even abstract photographic nude may in fact be Cunningham's invention.

This samples Cunningham's career, from 1906 to 1976, from age 23 to the year of her death. That artistic longevity, if nothing else, is worthy of note. But the real strngth of the collection is in the photos themselves.

The abstract photos, like 'Helen' (plate 42) and 'Roi' (plate 34) are utterly literal and utterly baffling. Each is a simple picture, but shows just how complex the interaction of human figure and viewpoint can be. Many, like plates 44 and 51, are simple celebrations of form. One thing struck me, again and again. Modern photographers often present a figure that's made up and airbrushed to polyethylene perfection - something strangely inhuman. Cunningham captures the human animal more precisely, in the delicate down of feminine skin (plate 43), the scars that record events in a person's life (plates 49 and maybe 72), goosebumps (plate 27), even stretch marks on a woman richly pregnant (plate 98). These details add depth to Cunningham's work, offering something new at every level of detail in her pictures.

I highly recommend this collection, especially as it documents one of the visions that founded modern photographic style.

//wiredweird

The beauty of the works of Imogen Cunningham to this day remain staggering. Knowing that the photographs are early contributions to the genre of nude photography is even more amazing. Yes, compared to some of today's art photographers the poses may appear a bit static and stagey, but the quality of composition, of light and shadow, of clarity of vision is still hard to match. This is an historically important volume and one of great beauty. The accompanying essay is brief but sensitive and informative.

Cunningham, always with an eye that sees the things that all the rest miss, gives us the most beautiful nudes this year.From the lush women of a different time- but timeless like the series of her husband Roi, and her twin boys in the Alabamas."Family on the Beach" is a mother and father with their young daughter caressed all by the shores breeze. Five stars is just not enough for this one.

This book is not just about nudes. Parts of the human body are present in every photograph, but the photos are not only of nude bodies. Hands, eyes, and ears are also explored. The work that is presented is very well done, and this book is valuable for completing coverage of topics Imogen Cunningham photographed, but nudes, or other body parts are a fairly small part of her work. The author mentions two decades where Cunningham did very little photography of nudes.

Cunningham was primarily a portrait photographer. Portraiture represented nearly all of her commercial work, and much of her personal work as well. For this reason, I recommend "Imogen Cunningham: Portraiture" over this book. It's a better representation of her work, and as such tells more about the photographer. The biography, "Imogen Cunningham : Ideas Without End : A Life and Photographs" is also available and is a good introduction to her life and works.

It is astonishing to think that the images Imogen made came from such an early age in photography. Starting in 1906, Imogen made pictures of the human body that stand out as the finest today. These images have been lusciously reproduced in this book that plots the history and progress of Imogen through her career. What a pioneering career it must have been. The subjects of her lens were almost unheard of in those days where the showing of an ankle was scandalous. She makes no technical concessions whatever; each exposure is exactly in needle-sharp focus and rendered in smooth gradual tones of the highest quality process. She must have had strict discipline to technical detail to have consistently produced this quality of images, there is no other way. I would have loved to have known her. The things she could tell a fellow photographer must have been volumes. You cannot be disappointed by this book.

Imogen Cunningham brings to light an eye for the simplest beauty. The photographs contained within this book are diverse with studies in children, families, the male nude, the female nude, textures in nature and some in more familiar home environs. I am particularly fond of her portraits in the book as well as her fleshier pieces. She has absolutely beautiful composition and creates incredible foils for the human skin to be set off by. I love to use the book's photographs for reference when I am painting. It is an essential in my collection.

Cunningham's photographs of the unclothed human convey the warmest, most familial feeling one can find in this area of photography. One hesitates to speak of her nude studies as part of a genre, because the personality of her subject is always felt, more than any abstraction or ideation (except in her early work).

I purchased the book as possible source material for painting.
Nude figures as a starting point for abstract painting.
Definitely great images; in fact they are so good that it's difficult to abstract them to another medium.