c) "wooden eagle"

Imogen Cunningham
1883 - 1976
Snake in a Bucket

 

gelatin silver print, 1920s
image: 3 ½ by 4 ½ in. (8.9 by 11.4 cm.)

 

Snake in a Bucket is one of a series of photographs in which Cunningham focused her camera on a sinuous garden snake. In the early 1920s, with young children at home, she found inspiration in the plants and objects in her immediate surroundings. Of this period, she said, ‘Ron and Pad, my twin boys, were great persons for hunting for things that interested them and that were interesting to me, too—such as snakes, which they carried home in their pockets. Pad was very good at holding their tails . . .’ (Dialogue with Photography, p. 233).

 

Cunningham made at least six negatives of snakes throughout the 1920s, including three views of Snake in a Bucket and the unusual ‘Negative,—Snake’ from 1927, in which she manipulated an earlier 1921 image to produce a negative variant unique to her oeuvre. Prints titled ‘Snake’ and ‘Negative,—Snake’ were among the 40 photographs Cunningham selected for her 1932 one-woman exhibition, Impressions in Silver, at the Los Angeles Museum.

 

In the early 1920s, Cunningham abandoned her pictorial style, which relied on soft focus and soft printing, and instead embraced the emerging modernist approach, objectively presenting visual facts with clarity and directness. At the beginning and end of that same decade, she took a limited number of photographs of snakes. This stunning image from 1929 is one of a few photographs she made of a snake in a bucket. By setting up her 8-by-10-inch view camera near her subject, Cunningham intentionally suppressed descriptive information about the container’s shape, texture, and position. She concentrated on the elaborate pattern of the snake’s skin and its flowing form, approaching this photograph as if on one of her commercial portrait assignments.

a) "snake"

"Prop" found in Janskerkhof Theater School 
Hand carved wooden eagle 

 

"Large hand carved wooden eagle statue, Folk art from East Tennessee. "The house of the Lumberjack Savoiex" The large house preserves the memory of a rustic Italian. He spent his days in the forest chopping wood and making charcoal. This vast, rejuvenated house includes a beautiful living room with a view of the meadow and century-old oaks."

 

A kitchen with everything a good housewife needs. On the landing, a toilet and a sofa can accommodate an additional person. The sun revolves around the house from sunrise to sunset. All linen is provided".

A Found collectors collection of art works. The collector arranged them in two groups, titled "Beeldspraak" | "Imagery" (in literal translation "image spoke") and "ruimte + substantie" | "space + substance", and a third, nameless.

 

They were found in Kringloopwinkel De Arm 266, Utrecht, on 20th of March 2025. I visit this particular Kringloopwinkel at least once a week. I observe "new" old things that have found a comfortable position and re-visit articles which seem to have a longer-term residency there. 


 

 

FOLLOWING STEP 

 

WHAT NOW?


USING THE INTERNET AS THE PRIMARY SOURCE TO FIND THE "ORIGIN" OF FOUND THINGS WITHIN MY COLLECTION HAS DEFINITELY EXPOSED SOME CONCLUSIONS FOR ME. FIRSTLY, THE PRIORITY OF ADVERTISEMENTS AND SITES WHICH AIM TO SELL SOMETHING. AUCTION SITES AND GALLERIES WHERE THE PRICE IS THE FIRST INFORMATION YOU FIND. THIS IS A CLEAR EXAMPLE OF A CAPITALIST ENVIRONMENT WE FIND OURSELVES IN WITHIN THE INTERNET. ON TOP OF THAT I WAS FRUSTRATED TO BE LED TO AUCTION SITES WHICH DEFINE AND UNDERMINE OBJECTS WHICH ARE SOURCED FROM ELSEWHERE. DEFINING A HAND CARVED CHEST, WITH SYMBOLS, LIFE AND MEANING AS A PERFECT OBJECT FOR DOG TOYS IS TO PUT IT LIGHTLY, SHOCKING. 

 

THE RESEARCH PATHS I TOOK, PROVED TO ME THAT THE INTERNET IS NOT AN ETHICAL OR AUTHENTIC MEASURE TO FINDING MEANING OF FOUND OBJECTS OR IMAGES. UNLESS IT IS A KNOWN SOURCE FROM THE WESTERN WORLD, IT IS UNLIKELY TO FIND MUCH INFORMATION ON IT. IT IS PROVING TO ME THAT I NEED TO TEST OUT OTHER METHODS OF COLLECTING STORIES WHICH WOULD LEAD TO DEEPENING MY KNOWLEDGE OF CERTAIN TOPICS. IT COULD BE INTERESTING TO "EXPOSE" THESE DISCOVERIES IN A SPATIAL CONTEXT, HIGHLIGHTING THESE PROBLEMS ON HOW THINGS ARE DESCRIBED AND OBJECTIFIED.

SOURCING THE ORIGINS

d) "African Chest"

a) "callas"

Imogen Cunningham

Two Callas, ca. 1925


 Silver Gelatin Print, Printed Later

Size

13 1/4 × 10 1/4 in | 33.7 × 26 cm

Rarity

 

Imogen Cunningham was a photographer who is best known for her stunning close-ups of flowers shown with graceful curves, sensuous arabesques, and organic spirals, softened through the glow of filtered illumination. Cunningham was born in Portland, Oregon and was the fifth in a family of 10 children. She grew up in Seattle and graduated from the University of Washington as a chemistry major. This was a boon to her understanding of darkroom printing processes. Cunningham worked in the portrait studio of Edward S. Curtis on the first few of his 20-volume set of portraits, “The North American Indian.” Afterwards, Cunningham traveled to Germany to study photographic chemistry. Cunningham worked on the West Coast and moved to the Bay Area with her husband. She established her own studio, becoming one of the very first professional woman photographers. Her first love was portraiture, and she photographed people in the art world: Gertrude Stein, Frida Kahlo Rivera, Spencer Tracy, and Cary Grant among others. She photographed her husband nude on Mount Rainier in 1915, producing the first series of male nudes made by a woman photographer.mIt wasn’t until the 1920s that she began to explore plants and flowers as subjects for her photographic work. In 1932, Cunningham along with Ansel Adams, Edward Westin, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, and Willard Van Dyke founded the Group f/64 collective that supported a Modernist vision of photography. The ‘f/64’ was a reference to the aperture setting which gives the sharpest clarityfrom foreground to background in a picture. It was the sharp focused photographs of calla lilies, magnolia blossoms, flowers, aloe, and amaryllis – bordering on abstraction – that became her most influential work. Although she was well respected as a photographer among her peers, she was never given proper recognition in the art world until the 1960s and 1970s.  But she did live long enough to finally see the recognition that was her due. A retrospective of her work, the first thorough survey in more than 35 years, is being shown at the Getty Museum through June 12, 2022.Her work is in the collections of major museums, such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and others.

IN THE RESEARCH PATH I CAME ACROSS AN INTERVIEW WITH IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM, I TRANSCRIBED THE INTERVIEW AND HIGHLIGHTED SENTENCES, PHRASES OR WORDS WHICH I COULD POTENTIALLY USE AS INSPIRATION LAYERED WITH THE OTHER SLIDES FOUND IN THE SAME COLLECTION. 

 

I CREATED A VIDEO OF THE DIFFERENT SLIDES AND LAYERED OVER THE TEXT AND AUDIO EXTRACTED FROM THE INTERVIEW, I WANTED TO EXPLORE HOW THE IMAGERY AND TEXT CAN RELATE TO ONE ANOTHER. 

 

I DIDN'T WANT TO ALTER ANY OF THE TEXT OTHER THAN CHOOSING WHICH TEXT I INCLUDED. IT WAS AN INTERESTING EXERCISE HOWEVER, THERE IS NOT A STRONG ENOUGH THEME OR TOPIC BEING PORTRAYED. 

INCOHERENT NARRATIVES

 

"Prop" found in Janskerkhof Theater School 
Hand carved chest 

 

A lovely little African tribal chest with an ebonised finish. Perfect size for dog toys, kindling or bathroom storage. Primitive carved wood box. Hand carved from high quality wood and elegant colonial style.