Imogen Cunningham

signed in pencil in the margin, a fragment of the photographer's Mills College label and with numerical notations in pencil and crayon on the reverse, 1920s

Collection of Gryffyd Partridge, the photographer's eldest son, and his wife Janet

Charles Isaacs Photographs, Inc., New York, 1993

Richard Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: 1883-1976 (Köln, 2001), p. 186

Constance Sullivan, ed., Women Photographers (New York, 1990), pl. 37

Douglas R. Nickel, Picturing Modernity: Highlights from the Photography Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pl. 21

Happy Birthday Photography: Bokelberg Sammlung (Kunsthaus Zürich, 1989), pl. 107

This rare early print is on the delicately warm-toned, matte-surface paper appropriate for Cunningham's photographs from this period. Like the best of Cunningham's prints, this one presents its subject in full and fascinating detail, both in the textured scales of the snake and in the reflective surface of the bucket. It is in generally excellent condition. The margin edges are appropriately age-darkened and lightly soiled. There is a pin-hole in each margin corner, and there is a small loss to the upper left margin corner. On the reverse of the print, there is a small fragment of the photographer's Mills College label, as well as the following notations in pencil or crayon: '494'; '370,5'; and an illegible notation. There are brown paper tape remnants in the corners on the reverse, as well as minor soiling.
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The photograph offered here, an early print of Cunningham’s Snake in a Bucket, is one of a series of photographs in which she focused her camera on a sinuous garden snake.  In the 1920s, with three young children at home, Cunningham found inspiration in the plants and objects in her immediate surroundings.  Of this period, Cunningham said, ‘Ron and Pad, my twin boys, were great persons for hunting for things that interested them and that were interesting to me, too—such as snakes, which they carried home in their pockets.  Pad was very good at holding their tails . . .’ (Dialogue with Photography, p. 233).

While her famous flower studies of this period concentrated on details of plant anatomy, Snake in a Bucket presents its subject in its entire, sensuous, natural form.  In the present photograph and others from this series, the snake rests in a bucket of modulated shadow and light.  Cunningham made at least six negatives of snakes throughout the 1920s, including three views of Snake in a Bucket and the unusual ‘Negative,—Snake’ from 1927, in which she manipulated an earlier 1921 image to produce a negative variant unique to her oeuvre. 

Two prints titled ‘Snake’ and ‘Negative,—Snake’ were among the 40 photographs Cunningham selected for her 1932 one-woman exhibition, Impressions in Silver, at the Los Angeles Museum.  Extant early prints of any of the snake studies, however, are rare.  As of this writing, no early prints of this image are believed to have been offered at auction.  Similarly-sized early prints have been located at the Art Institute of Chicago, given by gallerist Julien Levy and his wife Jean; previously in the collection of photographer and collector, Werner Bokelberg; and in a private collection.  Two smaller prints (measuring 3 7/16 by 4 ½ inches) have also been located, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gifted in 1963 with The Henry Swift Collection by his widow, Florence Alston Swift, and in a private collection.