Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham photographed for seventy-five years, was still taking on new projects at ninety-two, and paid for her first camera by selling her own prints as a student. She studied chemistry at Washington specifically to understand photographic process, wrote her thesis on it, and then worked for Edward Curtis before a scholarship took her to Dresden to study photochemistry. Her early work was soft and symbolist, including nudes of her husband on Mount Rainier in 1915 that caused a local scandal. What changed her was botany: confined to home with three small sons in the 1920s, she photographed the plants in her garden, and the magnolia, calla and agave studies - hard-edged, close, formally exact - are the work that got her into Group f/64 with Weston and Adams in 1932 and into Film und Foto in Stuttgart. She shot portraits for Vanity Fair, made a long series of street portraits of strangers, and in her eighties began After Ninety, photographing people older than herself, which she was still working on when she died at ninety-three. She was blunt, funny and impatient with reverence; asked which of her photographs was her favourite, she said the one she was going to take tomorrow. Her portrait subjects included Frida Kahlo, Cary Grant, Martha Graham and Morris Graves. She was made a fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974. Her Two Callas is among the most reproduced botanical photographs ever made. The Imogen Cunningham Trust still administers the prints she authorised.

• Lived: 1883 CE – 1976 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist