Cunningham ordered her first camera from a correspondence school during her student years at the University of Washington. Her father, who had always encouraged her interest in the arts and literature, was dismayed at her determination to be a ‘dirty photographer.’ Despite these feelings, he helped her build a darkroom in the family woodshed and equipped it with a candle-lit safelight. It was the first in a seventy-year series of cramped, inadequate darkrooms.

On the advice of one of her professors, who foresaw a career in scientific photography for her, Cunningham studied chemistry, writing her senior thesis on Modern Processes of Photography. Her first photographs were of a dawn in a marsh, a portrait of her father, and a photograph of herself face down, full length and nude on the university campus. Her first photographic income came from an assignment to make lantern slides for a botany professor. After graduation, she worked in the Curtis Studio in Seattle, processing platinum prints until a scholarship from her college sorority funded a yearís study of chemistry in Germany.

Cunningham once stated that she “…had done a little of many kinds of things, but had made a living photographing people for their portraits.” More serious portrait work began when she opened a studio in Seattle on her return from Germany. Her work was highly regarded, the press was generous, and her professional status assured until the birth of one son, and a twin pregnancy, early in her marriage to Roi Partridge, an etcher, forced her to close the studio and move to San Francisco.

Cunningham had often said that she could photograph anything exposed to light, and this ability led her to photograph the plants she tended while she cared for her three very young sons. She photographed the guests she entertained as a faculty wife, the professors, the students, the visiting performance artists and musicians, and her friends. A honing of her individual style was on-going. Shortly after the move to California, she made a change in style from the more traditional, romantic, soft-focus approach to sharp focus, ìstraightî photography, in which the camera becomes a direct window into reality. Although her private correspondence, now in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, reflects her serious difficulties during these years with the transition from a successful young professional to a house-bound wife, many of these photographs are regarded as some of her most important work.

A number of years later, she joined with several Bay Area photographers sharing a mutual ideology to form Group f.64. Named after the smallest aperature of a camera, the founding members included Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Willard Van Dyke. While short-lived, the work of Group f.64 remains a major influence on photography today.

As her boys grew older and self-sufficient, Cunningham began to work away from home. An occasional assignment for Vanity Fair in Hollywood led to a proposal to spend a month in New York and to a divorce from an uncooperative husband. She returned home and supported herself with her portrait commissions, sales of her early plant photographs, interior design work, and teaching at the California School of Fine Arts.

Despite her experimentation with different photographic methods throughout her career, her perspectives remained consistently unique. She was still photographing until a few days before her death in 1976 at the age of 94.