In Imogen Cunningham’s “Ruth Asawa, Sculptor,” (1952) the Japanese-American sculptor is front and center.
Asawa’s serious gaze is focused somewhere off-camera, with her body almost blending into the black background. She delicately holds one of her looped-wire sculptures in front of her, which bends over her shoulder and out of view. I’m used to seeing Asawa’s pieces hanging from the ceiling, slowly dancing as the air in the gallery shifts when people walk by. But in this staged photo, the floppy, organic nature of the wire piece comes through.
The picture is part of Imogen Cunningham’s retrospective at the Seattle Art Museum, organized by the J. Paul. Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition, composed of over almost 200 photographs, covers Cunningham’s illustrious seven decades-long career—from her early Pictorialist-style photos to her sensual up-close botanical shots to her more experimental double exposures. Cunningham is perhaps best known for her bold portraits, particularly of great 20th-century female artists like painter Frida Kahlo, writer Gertrude Stein, and dancer Martha Graham.
But it’s her photographs of Asawa and her work that I find the most compelling and the best part of the exhibition. The artists met one another in San Francisco in 1950 just after Asawa graduated from college. Despite their differences in background and age (Cunningham was 40 years Asawa’s senior), the two forged a friendship.
