Top 42 Quotes & Sayings by Imogen Cunningham

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American photographer Imogen Cunningham.

Last updated on April 14, 2025.

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.

American - Photographer | April 12, 1883 - June 24, 1976

Source: Wikipedia

There are certain things you don't discuss with Ansel, especially if you don't agree.

Imogen Cunningham

I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn't have a darkroom, but that didn't stop me from photographing.

Imogen Cunningham

Well, I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

Imogen Cunningham

I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.

Imogen Cunningham

I'd never kill myself for a man. I wouldn't do it for anybody.

Imogen Cunningham

When people ask me silly questions about my private life, I just say, I don't discuss that.

Imogen Cunningham

Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There's always someone who doesn't like it.

Imogen Cunningham

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

Imogen Cunningham

Anybody is influenced by where and how he lives.

Imogen Cunningham

Get it out of your historic head.

Imogen Cunningham

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.

Imogen Cunningham

I was poor. When you're poor you work, and when you're rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.

Imogen Cunningham

I told the students that whatever they did in class was for the wastebasket.

Imogen Cunningham

I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America. I wanted to photograph.

Imogen Cunningham

I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

Imogen Cunningham

My mind is vacant on names, but I know him as well as anything. When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back.

Imogen Cunningham

I don't talk about success. I don't know what it is. Wait until I'm dead.

Imogen Cunningham

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

Imogen Cunningham

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.

Imogen Cunningham

A woman said to me when she first sat down, You're photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?

Imogen Cunningham

I hate big models.

Imogen Cunningham

I don't know what love means.

Imogen Cunningham

Some people say to me, Isn't it too bad that people discovered you so late? I never thought that.

Imogen Cunningham

You see, I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America.

Imogen Cunningham

I don't love the world. I think Jupiter should have hit us.

Imogen Cunningham

I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.

Imogen Cunningham

When People magazine called me, I did the job on Ansel. I'm older than Ansel and he has to mind me.

Imogen Cunningham

I don't resent anything.

Imogen Cunningham

When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back.

Imogen Cunningham

I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life.

Imogen Cunningham

I wasn't very ambitious. I think that's the solution. I just took things as they came. I wouldn't say I didn't have any problem, but I didn't care. I didn't think I was going to save the world by doing photography as some of these people do. I was just having a good time doing it, and so I still had a good time no matter what I had to photograph.

Imogen Cunningham

Which is my best picture? The one I will do tomorrow.

Imogen Cunningham

You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

Imogen Cunningham

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

Imogen Cunningham

...There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

Imogen Cunningham

None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

Imogen Cunningham

I just believe in working. I'm not one of those romantic explainers of my own individual point of view.

Imogen Cunningham

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow.

Imogen Cunningham

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

Imogen Cunningham

So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

Imogen Cunningham

Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again --- it never would have been the same. Start stealing!

Imogen Cunningham

I never divide photographers into creative and uncreative, I just call them photographers. Who is creative? How do you know who is creative or not?

Imogen Cunningham