Imogen Cunningham

A signed, first edition copy of Imogen!, with a signed original photograph "False Hellebore, 1926."

• Imogen Cunningham (American).
• Seattle and London: University of Washington Press for the Henry Art Gallery, 1974.
• 110 pages.
• With black-and-white photographs printed in offset.
• Number 78 of 150 signed copies with a gelatin silver photograph.
• Bound in original quarter black morocco over black cloth-covered boards, titles stamped to spine in silver, publisher's black cloth-covered board slipcase.

Imogen Cunningham's first monograph, a comprehensive, chronological survey of her diverse career, was published to mark her ninety-first birthday and coincide with two exhibitions: Imogen! Imogen Cunningham Photographs 1910-1973 and Images of Imogen, 1903-1973, both at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle.

Imogen Cunningham's career in photography spanned 70 years. In 1910, she established a studio in Seattle before moving to San Francisco in 1917, where she met a circle of like-minded photographers and became a founding member of Group f/64, an informal group including Ansel Adams, Sonya Noskowiak and Edward Weston, who challenged the prevalent pictorialist aesthetic. Close to half of the members were women, making Group f/64 one of the first modern art movements equally run by women.

"That it took almost seventy years for a monograph to be published on Cunningham's ground-breaking career is reflective of the uphill battle that began to be undertaken in the 1970s, when several early-20th-century female photographers finally began to be more permanently written into photographic history." (What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women)