An Inspiration Compounded
of Hands and Feet
IMOGEN Cunningham photographed Martha Graham in the summer of 1931, in Santa Barbara, Calif. They worked outside, in front of the barn at Graham's mother's home. The afternoon was hot, the smell unpleasant and the flies bothersome, but together they managed to produce a collection of nearly 90 images, an extraordinary double-portrait of both photographer and choreographer.
The new acquaintances were well matched. Graham, 37, stood at the forefront of the modern-dance movement back in New York. Cunningham, 48, one of the most important experimental photographers on the West Coast, was given her first retrospective exhibition later that year, at the M. H. deYoung Memorial Museum in San Francisco. The work of both artists was marked by clarity and simplicity and the afterglow of a youthful lyricism.
What Graham had to say about modern dance applied as well to Cunningham's photography: "It is not 'pretty,' but it is much more real." By the time she met Graham, Cunningham had shifted her focus from plants to body parts, especially artists' and musicians' hands. Both vegetation and human form were rendered so literally as to become abstract, and poetic. Her portraits of Graham's hands and feet retain a palpable sense of the organic, even though they are severely cropped and composed. The picture frame functions for its interior space much as Graham's masklike face heightened the expressiveness of her body. There is something quite poignant in the way these hands and feet converse, echoing each other in lines and triangles. Shape, Cunningham observed, is the photographer's only means of empathy. And to animate those shapes, she often used natural light; Graham's skin is touchable, and her toes graspable.
For Graham, the feet and hands were neither to be ignored nor wasted on decoration. They were an integral component of the tensile body structure that she was in the process of building: flexed feet that pressed the ground and cupped hands that pressed the air. "Think of what a wonderful thing the hand is," she said, "and what vast potentialities of movement it has as a hand and not as a poor imitation of something else."
The feet were to function as sensitively as hands, able to apprehend all the minute adjustments made throughout the body during even the simplest shift of weight when walking. Primitive Mysteries, immediately acknowledged as a masterpiece after its premiere in February 1931, was based on a walk. Graham's group had investigated this fundamental movement for months and even visited Jones Beach on Long Island to press their feet into the surf. Graham's technique required a complete articulation of the foot; all of its bones must move, she said. Cunningham understood the preternatural strength and flexibility of those feet and made monuments of them.
In those early years, Graham's now-famous contraction and release was not confined to the torso. The hands and feet, she insisted, must respond as well. This relationship was activated in the warm-up to her technique class, which had been largely codified by 1929-30. Cunningham's photos suggest this first sitting position.
Graham made little use of these photographs, which are held by the Cunningham Trust in Berkeley, Calif., and can be seen by appointment at Photography: The Platinum Gallery in New York. Today, we identify Graham with the later repertory pictures by Barbara Morgan. Cunningham suspected the choreographer's disapproval, and, most likely, she was correct. Graham spent six more decades cultivating a portraiture as theatricalized and archetypal as the characters she danced. In contrast, Cunningham's images feel far too sensuous and intimate. In them, the dancer regains her human flesh and sinew.