Imogen Cunningham

mounted, signed by the photographer in pencil on the mount, signed, titled, dated, and inscribed '4540 Harbor View--Oakland--' by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, matted, framed, before 1929

Gift of the photographer to a friend, San Francisco, 1971

Sotheby's New York, 26 and 27 April 1989, Sale 5833, Lot 312

Acquired by the Quillan Company from the above

Jill Quasha, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs (New York, 1991),  cover and pl. 55 (this print)

Other prints of this image:

Richard Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: Ideas without End, A Life in Photographs (San Francisco, 1993), pl. 42

Imogen Cunningham: The Modernist Years (Tokyo, 1993), unpaginated

Imogen Cunningham: Original Photographs Offered by The Imogen Cunningham Trust (California, 1978), pl. T6

Richard Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: Flora (Boston, 1996), pl. 27

George M. Craven, 'Imogen Cunningham,' Aperture 11, No. 4, 1964, p. 146

Pioneers of American Photography: Masterworks of the Pfeifer Collection (Munich, 2001), p. 2

David Travis and Anne Kennedy, Photography Rediscovered: American Photographs, 1900-1930 (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 38

This remarkable early print is on paper with a semi-glossy surface. Consisting almost entirely of subtly modulated gray tones, the print delivers a great deal of intricate detail. The print is in excellent condition. There is faint and appropriate silvering in the dark areas. When the photograph is examined closely in raking light, a small circular area of original retouching can be seen in the upper left quadrant. Also visible only in raking light is a faint wrinkle near the lower right corner, which was most likely present in the print prior to mounting, or occurred during mounting. In short, there is nothing that diminishes the beauty of this photograph. The photograph is mounted to thin buff-colored board which is very slightly age-darkened.
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The photograph offered here, a scarce, early print of Imogen Cunningham's study of the leaves of a banana plant, is one of a series of photographs of the botanical world that brought Cunningham international fame.  Of this series, which includes the photographer's famous studies of magnolia blossoms and callas, the banana is among the most abstract.  Cunningham has photographed the banana's broad, waxy leaves in their concentric spiral, before the plant has matured and the leaves drop and separate, as in a palm.  The result is a study of lights and darks in shifting planes, an optical illusion of receding and advancing space. 

Trained as a chemist, Cunningham supplemented her college income by making slides for botanists.  She won a scholarship to Germany in 1909, where she studied at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden and came into contact with undercurrents of modernism that would influence her later artistic development. In the next decade, photographers in the United States and abroad would begin to shift from the artistic photography of the fin-de-siècle and move toward a more realistic, objective vision.  Cunningham's successive simplification of flower forms in the 1910s and 1920s were her own breakthrough into this new aesthetic, putting her in the good company of such like-minded photographers as Edward Weston (Lot 19) and Ansel Adams (Lot 1).  In her best botanical studies, Cunningham elevates whole or parts of plants to icon status, producing images that are almost hypnotic in their power.  Dramatically lit and monumentally composed, the plants in these photographs have a vitality that transcends the picture frame.

It was Edward Weston who, when asked to choose American photographers for Stuttgart's landmark Film und Foto exhibition of 1929, included Cunningham in his selection.  This international exhibition of avant-garde photography was one of the most influential shows of its type, fostering many photographers' international reputations and defining progressive trends in photography for the next half century.  The ten submissions by Cunningham included a nude study, an industrial photograph, and eight iconic botanicals, including the banana leaves image offered here.  The image was subsequently included in, among others, her one-person show of 40 photographs called Impressions in Silver, held at the Los Angeles Museum in 1932. 

As of this writing, only three other early prints of the Banana Leaves have been located: one in the collection of the George Eastman House, Rochester, and another in the Julien Levy Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Cunningham scholar Susan Ehrens is aware of one early contact print in a private collection.