The photograph offered here has a distinguished exhibition history, having been hung in no fewer than four shows during Lavenon’s lifetime. It bears an exhibition label from the 1941 Sixteenth Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art (later the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).
During the 1920s and 1930s, the San Francisco Bay Area photographer Alma Lavenson distinguished herself from other West Coast modernists Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, by focusing her camera not on the natural world, but primarily on architectural and industrial subjects. Unlike East Coast photographers Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, and Margaret Bourke-White, it was not Lavenson’s intent to glorify industrial forms as achievements of machine-age technology but rather, through her strong compositions, to reveal the inherent structural forms and patterns created by light and shadow.
In 1932, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Lavenson’s photographs were included with those by Adams, Weston, Cunningham and others, in the inaugural exhibition of Group f.64 – the loose association of West Coast photographers united in promoting a ‘straight’ approach to photography in direct response to the excesses of Pictorialism.
The following year, Lavenson had solo exhibitions at both the de Young Museum and the Brooklyn Institute of Arts (now the Brooklyn Museum). Solo exhibitions at the Oakland Museum and at the San Francisco Museum of (Modern) Art followed in 1942, 1948, and 1960. Her photograph, San Ildefonso Indians (1941), was included in Edward Steichen’s seminal international 1955 exhibition and publication, The Family of Man.
During the last forty years, Alma Lavenson’s photographs from the 1920s and 1930s have been included in numerous significant museum exhibitions and accompanying publications focused on Modernism, Precisionism, and on the history of women photographers; as well as museum exhibitions celebrating important private collections of photography. Her photographs are in the following institutions collections: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; New Orleans Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, Florida, among others.
