Alma Lavenson
Born 1897, San Francisco
Died 1989, Piedmont, California
1919 BA University of California, Berkeley
Selected museum exhibitions: University of California, Berkeley (1999); Baltimore Museum of Art (1988); Oakland Museum (1979); California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside (1979); Center for Creative Photography, Tucson (1979); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1942, 1948, 1960); Brooklyn Museum (1933); M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco (1933)
Selected public collections: Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; J. Paul Getty Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yale University Art Gallery
One of the leading California-based photographers of the mid-twentieth century, Alma Lavenson is best known for images that evoke the region’s history through architecture. Largely self-taught, she took up photography in 1919 and pursued it for the rest of her life. Transitioning from the Pictorialist style of her early work to a modernist approach, her work was included in the first exhibition of Group f/64 in 1932, alongside Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham. In Cannery Buildings, Monterey, California, 1939, she documented the industrial canneries of coastal California, capturing the forms of these utilitarian structures with a dramatic, raking light.