Imogen's Cameras and Darkrooms

Imogen's Cameras and Darkrooms

Cameras

In her 1961 Interview for the University of California Regional Cultural History Project, Imogen said, that she was "very simple in her equipment".

In 1905-1906 during her junior year at the University of Washington Imogen ordered her first camera , a 4x5 inch camera with an instruction booklet, from a correspondence school. Her father made space in the woodshed for a tar-paper-lined darkroom lit only by acandle in a red box.

Her next cameras were a new 5x7 inch Century view camera and a small Kodak which she took with her to Germany when she was awarded a grant to study at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden.

Her son, Rondal, remembers that her most frequently used cameras were:

* 1915 to 1935 -- a 31/4 x 41/4 Auto Graflex with a 7 inch Tessar lens

* 1922 to 1956 -- an 8x10 Korona View Camera

* 1923 to 1928 -- a 4x5 view camera

* 1925 to 1976 -- a 4x5 Revolving back Graflex with an 8 inch Tessar lens

* 1936 to 1946 -- a Super Ikonta B

* 1946 to 1965 -- a 4x5 "Baby" Deardorff .

* In 1945 she bought the first of three Rolleiflexes, cameras she used increasingly for the rest of her life.

Darkrooms

Rondal, who joined her in the darkroom, standing at the sink on a box in the early 1920s, reports that "Imogen developed large format film in ABC pyro and judged development by inspection. Small film was developed in a variety of developers, FPG, DK20, D76, Microdol X. Both her darkroom in Oakland and her darkroom later in San Francisco were in the basement. They were miserable, confined, dank hell-holes. Her enlarger was a 5x7 Elwood and a smaller 2x3 Eastman Kodak Professional. Both tended to cook the film."

Imogen Cunningham established the Trust to preserve her negatives and to encourage the exhibition, sale and presentation of her photographs.

We encourage you to visit the site and learn more about Imogen. There are many excellent books by and about Imogen and her work, as well as articles and biographical information on this site.

Several galleries sell postumous Imogen Cunningham Trust prints in silver gelatin and platinum,as well as unsigned orifinal prints by Imogen. And there are also listed sources on the left for notecards, calenders, postcards and other reproductions of her work.

http://www.imogencunningham.com/index.html