This early, highly Modernist study of an eye by Imogen Cunningham may be unique; no other print has been located as of this writing. Made in the 1920s, this print is on the warm-toned matte-surfaced paper that Cunningham favored in that decade. Like the two other early Cunningham photographs in this auction, lots 278 and 280, it is rendered here as a contact print. Cunningham laid the negative directly onto the photographic paper in the darkroom, yielding a finished image of exceptional focus and clarity the same size as the original negative. Cunningham was aware of the work of her Modernist counterparts and their propensity for smaller print formats, and this print possesses the same detail and intimacy of scale as contemporaneous photographs by André Kertész, Alfred Stieglitz, and the Bauhaus photographers, for example.
This photograph comes originally from the collection of Richard A. Lorenz (1952-2001), the Cunningham expert and author. A native of Pennsylvania, Lorenz attended Muhlenberg College in Allentown, initially intending to study medicine. As editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, he became involved in the arts and subsequently changed the direction of his studies. After graduating in 1974, Lorenz moved to San Francisco where he became active in the city’s vibrant photography scene. His special interest was in California photography from the first decades of the 20th century, and his subjects included California Pictorialism, Margrethe Mather, and Imogen Cunningham. It was as a Cunningham scholar that he was best known, serving as a Trustee of the Imogen Cunningham Trust, curating exhibitions of her work, and authoring a series of books on the photographer. He reproduced this actual print in two of his books: Imogen Cunningham: On the Body (1998) and Imogen Cunningham: Ideas without End (1993).
The subject of the image is Cunningham’s friend Portia Hume, a nearby resident of Berkeley and a noted psychiatrist.
