The Unmade Bed

While teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, documentary photographer Dorothea Lange asked her students to photograph their environment with no human presence. Having overheard this brief, Imogen Cunningham decided to take up the challenge: “And one morning I got up and that was the way my bed looked, and I threw my hairpins in it.”

During her nearly seventy-year photographic career, Cunningham investigated a range of photographic subject matter, from portraiture and pictorial work to botanical images, nudes, and street photography. The Unmade Bed evidences Cunningham’s aesthetic approach during the middle and latter half of her career, favoring sharp focus, great depth of field, precise exposure, and still life subjects.