A Planetary Lens explores how women writers and photographers revise and reimagine landscape, identity, and history in the U.S. West.

Thoroughly researched and beautifully produced, this catalogue complements the first comprehensive retrospective in the United States of Imogen Cunningham’s work in over thirty-five years. Celebrated American artist Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976) enjoyed a long career as a photographer, creating a large and diverse body of work that underscored her unique vision, versatility, and commitment to the medium. An early feminist and inspiration to future generations, Cunningham intensely engaged with Pictorialism and Modernism; genres of portraiture, landscape, the nude, still life, and street photography; and themes such as flora, dancers and music, hands, and the elderly. Organized chronologically, this volume explores the full range of the artist’s life and career. It contains nearly two hundred color images of Cunningham’s elegant, poignant, and groundbreaking photographs, both renowned and lesser known, including several that have not been published previously. Essays by Paul Martineau and Susan Ehrens draw from extensive primary source material such as letters, family albums, and other intimate materials to enrich readers’ understanding of Cunningham’s motivations and work.

An in-depth look at the many ways women around the world helped shape modern photography from the 1920s to the 1950s as they captured images of a radically changing world During the 1920s the New Woman was easy to recognize but hard to define. Hair bobbed and fashionably dressed, this iconic figure of modernity was everywhere, splashed across magazine pages or projected on the silver screen. A global phenomenon, she embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art--including photography. This groundbreaking, richly illustrated book looks at those "new women" who embraced the camera as a mode of expression and made a profound impact on the medium from the 1920s to the 1950s. Thematic chapters explore how women emerged as a driving force in modern photography, bringing their own perspective to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography and photojournalism. Featuring work by 120 photographers, this volume expands the history of photography by critically examining an international array of canonical and less well-known women photographers, from Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange and Lola Álvarez Bravo to Germaine Krull, Tsuneko Sasamoto and Homai Vyarawalla. Against the odds, these women produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.

In the pages of this book are reproduced all of the 503 images that Steichen described as "photographs, made in all parts of the world, of the gamut of life from birth to death with emphasis on daily relationship..."-- Back cover.

Chronicles the lives and careers of the members of the West Coast photography movement, including such famous names as Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston.