In a big exhibition for Taiwan's best photo gallery, the Taiwan International Visual Arts Center (TIVAC), 40 prints of Imogen Cunningham photographs are now on display (and for sale). But only 37 of them are so-called originals. The rest are reprints from the original negatives reproduced by the Imogen Cunningham Trust, which is run by one of her sons.
The exhibition itself is certainly worthy. Born in 1883, Cunningham was a California housewife who constructed her own homemade darkroom and went on to become one of the more influential photographers of the American modern movement, men included. Her early work of the 1910s consisted of haloed, pastoral landscapes and dreamy, psychological portraits. There are ready comparisons to the French symbolists, Impressionist painting, the still embryonic concept of surrealism, and the work of photographer Edward Steichen.
But Cunningham is most famous for what came after, the flower forms that helped to build the modernist aesthetic. The flowers were plucked from her own garden, and when she photographed them in a purified atmosphere, the emphasis on form came out on par with that of subject. The most obvious comparison here is to her contemporary, Georgia O'Keefe, who pushed her floral forms further with visual metaphors both sexual and psychological.
Cunningham was also known for her nudes, which pursued similar modernist concerns with pure forms, though she did not achieve as much there as with her flowers, and will always be remembered behind Edward Weston as the great abstractor of the nude female.
Rounding out the art with a historical perspective, the exhibition also includes some very interesting portraits, including four of famous photographers -- Weston, Man Ray, Alfred Steiglitz and a very manic looking Ansel Adams -- and three Cunningham self-portraits from 1913, 1958 and 1974 -- two years before her death.
The prints of these old negatives on display at TIVAC -- especially the florals -- are beautiful, large-scale silver gelatin prints that may even be larger and more exactingly printed than the originals. Almost all these reprints were made in the 1990s, and they come with mattes embossed with a fake-looking Imogen Cunningham signature and an official Chinese seal.
This practice raises certain questions of authenticity and value. The three originals come with a pedigree attested to by the Cunningham Trust that they are absolutely authentic. The most expensive of these costs NT$1.1 million. The reprints list prices alongside statements of limitations on additional reprints per year, with the number usually between five and 20.
These cost between NT$45,000 and in the case of one exceptionally famous image, Magnolia Blossom, The Tower of Jewels, NT$550,000.
For buyers looking at these "authentic" reprints, an important question is: how many "authentic" prints are already out there, and how does this affect the value of what is for sale here? Absolute transparency would solve this problem, but the art market is seldom transparent, especially in Taipei, which is not well integrated with New York, Paris and London.
Previously, Japan established itself as an art market of inflated value, and now Taiwan seems that it may be doing the same. The goal is to appropriate authenticity rather than create it, which is pretty normal for a culture of new money and a newly developed cultural sense. But how much will this process cost? That depends on how savvy the buyers are, or how badly they want to prove their newfound status. Either way, the Cunningham prints sure are beautiful.
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