Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite

Last updated
Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite
Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite - Judy Dater, 1974.jpg
Artist Judy Dater
Year1974 (1974)
Typephotograph
Medium Gelatin silver print
Subjectportrait, nude

Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite is a 1974 photograph by Judy Dater. It depicts elderly photographer Imogen Cunningham, encountering nude model Twinka Thiebaud behind a tree in Yosemite National Park. It is considered Dater's most popular photograph and according to the photographer, was inspired by Thomas Hart Benton's painting Persephone , which portrays a voyeur observing a nude woman reclining against a tree, who had been bathing in a stream. [1]

Contents

Background

Dater had been familiar with Benton's 1938–39 Persephone painting and its theme of voyeurism since her childhood, and it inspired her to attempt several earlier photos based on that theme. She has said that it "really worked" with this particular photo, because "it's a twist, given that it's two women looking at each other." [2]

At the time the photograph was taken, Cunningham was 90 years old and had been a famous photographer for 60 years. Dater had been a friend and admirer for the previous ten years, and considered Cunningham her mentor. The nude model, Twinka Thiebaud, was the daughter of painter Wayne Thiebaud. Dater had earlier photographed Twinka fully clothed, in 1970. [3]

The photograph was taken as part of a workshop called "The Nude in the Landscape", organized by Ansel Adams, that had about 100 students. Dater was one of the instructors, and Cunningham was a guest lecturer. [2] According to Twinka Thiebaud, the event started out in an undisciplined way. The clueless students swarmed around the nude models, and they "pounced like paparazzi", and were "unruly and disorganized". [2] Dater, Cunningham and Thiebaud stepped away from the crowd, and approached the tree. There, as many of the students gathered around her, Dater demonstrated how to work with a model. This photograph was the result. [2]

Critical reaction

The photo was immediately the subject of feminist critical analysis. In 1974, critic Lucy Dougan wrote that the photo "parodies depictions of male voyeurism in the history of Western art, as it playfully amends all those mythical violations of sacred places. It juxtaposes the city against the pastorale: Cunningham's technological baggage of city life/city seeing hangs around her neck in the form of a large camera, but here it is obsolete and new ways of seeing and old narratives come together." [4] She went on to compare the photo to a poem by Kathleen Raine that talks about an old woman's memory of her young breasts, but concludes that the photo has a "much lighter tone of heart" than the poem. [4]

In 1997, critic Sarah Boxer described the photo as "Imogen Cunningham sneaking around the trunk of a giant tree in Yosemite National Park and coming upon Twinka, a nude model who has one leg propped on a root and is looking around coyly" and called it "an amusing play" on the goddess Diana. [5] In 1999, critic Margarett Loke said that the photo "remains a delightful send-up of a photographer with a nude subject". [6] In 2011, critic Donna Stein wrote that "Dater reverses the traditional erotic relationship of a leering old man eyeing a voluptuous nude to show two women - youth and old age - confronting each other." [7] Stein reports that the photo "pays homage to the Persephone myth as portrayed in a painting by Thomas Hart Benton". [7]

Legacy

The photograph was widely seen when reproduced in a profile of Cunningham in a 1976 Life magazine special on "Remarkable American Women". [8]

John Hildebidle, poet and literature professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [9] has written a poem inspired by the photograph. [10] Prints of the photo are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [11] and Smith College Museum of Art. [12] The photo was part of an exhibition on the art of Yosemite which appeared at the Autry National Center, the Oakland Museum of California, the Nevada Museum of Art and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art from 2006 to 2008. [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ansel Adams</span> American photographer and environmentalist (1902–1984)

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imogen Cunningham</span> American photographer (1883–1976)

Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes. Cunningham was a member of the California-based Group f/64, known for its dedication to the sharp-focus rendition of simple subjects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Bernhard</span> German-born American photographer

Ruth Bernhard was a German-born American photographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ted Croner</span> American photographer (1922-2005)

Ted Croner was an American photographer, described as an influential member of the New York school of photography during the 1940s and 1950s. His images are said to represent the best example of this movement.

John Sexton is an American fine art photographer who specializes in black and white traditional analog photography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nude photography</span> Photography of the naked human body.

Nude photography is the creation of any photograph which contains an image of a nude or semi-nude person, or an image suggestive of nudity. Nude photography is undertaken for a variety of purposes, including educational uses, commercial applications and artistic creations. The exhibition or publication of nude photographs may be controversial, more so in some cultures or countries than in others, and especially if the subject is a minor.

Judith Rose Dater is an American photographer and feminist. She is celebrated for her 1974 photograph, Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite, featuring an elderly Imogen Cunningham, one of America's first woman photographers, encountering a nymph in the woods of Yosemite. The nymph is the model Twinka Thiebaud. The photo was published in Life magazine in its 1976 issue about the first 200 years of American women. Her photographs, such as her Self-Portraiture sequence, were also exhibited in the Getty Museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sonya Noskowiak</span>

Sonya Noskowiak was a 20th-century German-American photographer and member of the San Francisco photography collective Group f/64 that included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She is considered an important figure in one of the great photographic movements of the twewntieth century. Throughout her career, Noskowiak photographed landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Her most well-known, though unacknowledged, portraits are of the author John Steinbeck. In 1936, Noskowiak was awarded a prize at the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She was also represented in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Scenes from San Francisco” exhibit in 1939. Ten years before her death, Noskowiak's work was included in a WPA exhibition at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California.

Henry Swift was an American photographer and member of the famous Group f/64.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Marcus</span> American photographer

Ken Marcus is a famous American photographer, best known for his work in glamour and erotic photography with Penthouse and Playboy magazines and for his own website. For over 40 years he has produced hundreds of centerfolds, editorials, album covers, and advertisements. For many years, Marcus has lectured and conducted professional workshops in the US and internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamen Chinn</span> American photographer

Benjamen Chinn was an American photographer known especially for his black and white images of Chinatown, San Francisco and of Paris, France in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Twinka Thiebaud</span> American model

Twinka Thiebaud is an American model who has posed for many of the most important photographers of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosalie Gwathmey</span> American painter and photographer

Rosalie Gwathmey was an American painter and photographer known for her photos of black southern communities around her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dody Weston Thompson</span> American photographer (1923–2012)

Dody Weston Thompson was a 20th-century American photographer and chronicler of the history and craft of photography. She learned the art in 1947 and developed her own expression of “straight” or realistic photography, the style that emerged in Northern California in the 1930s. Dody worked closely with contemporary icons Edward Weston, Brett Weston and Ansel Adams during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, with additional collaboration with Brett Weston in the 1980s.

Fine art nude photography is a genre of fine-art photography which depicts the nude human body with an emphasis on form, composition, emotional content, and other aesthetic qualities. The nude has been a prominent subject of photography since its invention, and played an important role in establishing photography as a fine art medium. The distinction between fine art photography and other subgenres is not absolute, but there are certain defining characteristics.

Rondal Partridge was an American photographer. After working as an assistant to well-known photographers Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams in his youth, he went on to a long career as a photographer and filmmaker.

Persephone is a 1939 painting by the American painter Thomas Hart Benton. It depicts the Greek goddess Persephone, resting nude by a tree in a rural Midwestern setting. Benton, dressed in farmer's clothes, plays the role of Pluto and peeks from behind the tree.

David Myers was an American photographer and cinematographer noted for his documentaries on popular music and musicians.

Evelyne Z. Daitz was a Swiss-born American art dealer, curator, and agent, specializing in photography. She was the owner and director of the Witkin Gallery in New York from 1984 to 1999.

References

  1. Zakia, Richard D. (2013). Perception and Imaging: Photography--A Way of Seeing. London: Taylor & Francis. pp. 319–322. ISBN   9780240824536.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Sykes, Claire (Fall 2012). "Judy Dater: Seeing and Being Seen" (PDF). Photographer's Forum. Santa Barbara, California: Serbin Communications. pp. 10–20. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 3, 2016. Retrieved April 5, 2014.
  3. Coleman, A.D. (January 13, 1974). "Photography: Do Men Have It Any Easier?" (PDF). New York Times . Retrieved April 6, 2014.
  4. 1 2 Dougan, Lucy (1994). "Women's Bodies and Metamorphosis". In Fraser, Hilary; White, R. S. (eds.). Constructing Gender: Feminism and Literary Studies. Perth: UWA Publishing. p. 14. ISBN   9781875560349.
  5. Boxer, Sarah (September 19, 1997). "PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Beauty, in a Variety of Guises". New York Times . Retrieved April 6, 2014.
  6. Loke, Margarett (June 25, 1999). "PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Celebrating a Departure, With a Bow to the Body". New York Times . Retrieved April 6, 2014.
  7. 1 2 Stein, Donna (2011). "Judy Dater". In Marter, Joan (ed.). The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. pp. 22–23. ISBN   9780195335798.
  8. "The Creative Impulse : Imogen Cunningham". Life (Special Report on Remarkable American Women): 41. 1976.
  9. "Faculty: John Hildebidle". LIT@MIT. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2011. Archived from the original on April 7, 2014. Retrieved April 6, 2014.
  10. Hildebidle, John (1999). Defining Absence. Cliffs of Moher, Republic of Ireland: Salmon Publishing. p. 31. ISBN   9781897648582.
  11. "Imogen Cunningham and Twinka, Yosemite". Los Angeles County Museum of Art . Retrieved April 6, 2014.
  12. "Collections Database: Search Results". Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium. Retrieved April 18, 2021.
  13. Scott, Amy (2006). Yosemite: Art of an American Icon. Los Angeles and Berkeley: Autry National Center and University of California Press. pp.  138. ISBN   9780520249226.