We Will Visit Judy Dater in Her Studio

Imogen Cunningham's 1910 photo, Dream (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A link to the exhibit, which just opened

Probably her most famous photo

which was based on this painting by regionalist Thomas Hart Benton

Chronicle story on her exhibit

(Imogen) Cunningham became an influential mentor and friend until her death in 1976 at age 94. The two women are forever linked because of Dater’s best-known photograph, “Imogen and Twinka, Yosemite” (1974). The staged re-creation of Thomas Hart Benton’s painting “Persephone” (a poster of which hangs on Dater’s darkroom door) shows tiny 90-year-old Cunningham (black coat, white hair, heavy Rolleiflex around her neck) looking startled in a forest by the sight of a naked young woman (model Twinka, Wayne Thiebaud’s daughter) on the other side of a redwood tree.

Recognized all over the world, the photo was the first full-frontal nude to run in Life magazine, in its 1976 bicentennial celebration of American women.

“I almost didn’t put it in the (de Young) show,” Dater said. “It’s been a blessing, and also a curse. A lot of people know the picture and don’t know that I took it.”

Photographing women — of all ages, shapes and ethnicities — has always been central to Dater’s work. Early on she realized there was always an “implied story” when taking pictures in her subjects’ own homes, “wearing their own clothes, surrounded by their own objects.”

Where we are going