“I used to say that Imogen’s blood was three percent acetic acid. She seemed to have an acid reaction to so many things, and she could be very abrupt. But she had another side too.” – Ansel Adams

Her emotions bleed through each photograph, whether tender and sensitive or scathingly blunt. She remarked once that any time she chooses to photograph someone working with their hands, the hands become a main focus. The sharpness of some of her images and favoring of warm greys coupled with selective blurring create different tones from piece to piece, and invoke some sensitivity in her close-range photos. Her focus on hands and sheltering of faces, especially in nudes, invokes slight anxiety and notes of shame, rather than the liberating use of nudity by many other artists. While her work is pensive and attractive, there are subtle notes of melancholy, possibly reflective of the industrial world she was surrounded by. Her photo of mannequins and woman in a veil solidify an image of otherness and alienation, contrasted by her portraits of famous celebrities grimly looking the viewer in the eye. She joined a group of west coast photographers called “Group f/64”, where she began to evolve from soft-focus shots in favor of crisp images that horticulturists would eventually use to study plant anatomy. 

Her work inspires me because despite its bleak notes and somber attitude, her focus on the human subjects she photographs is a comforting study of connection to features we may overlook, a catalogue of human behavior inferred from stills.