Imogen Cunningham repped the Best Coast hard: born in Portland, schooled in Seattle, and settled in San Francisco.

She died in 1976 at age 93 - and for more than seven decades of that lifetime, she was taking photos.

Her interest in photography started when she was a teenager. She ordered a simple camera by mail, and her dad built her a makeshift darkroom in their backyard woodshed. She grew into a serious enough photographer that she was hired to work for famous Seattle photographer Edward Curtis after she finished college. She didn’t have a close relationship with Curtis, who was always in the field and never in his studio, but it was pretty prestigious for a first gig.

Pictorialism was the style that dominated the photography world when Cunningham was an up-and-comer. This is the most romantic of the photographies. Fuzzy, soft-focus lens treatments combined with clever printing techniques (basically old school Photoshop) rendered hazy, moody images that were fashionable up through the 1920s. Cunningham started out working in this way, taking photos of mysterious goddess babes and misty landscapes.

Then she turned over to the “light” side and became a member of f.64, a west coast photography group who’d had enough of pictorialism already. Other famous f.64-ers included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Together, these photogs promoted the rise of sharp, focused, modernist photography. The group’s cryptic name comes from the refined camera lens opening that they were partial to using.

Cunningham was married to artist and Mills College professor Roi Partridge, and took lots of pics of him prancing around in the nude. These portraits scandalized critics by subverting gender norms of the time, and proved that dudes, too, can make alluring and sassy models. They got divorced when Cunningham took a Vanity Fair job in NY, despite Partridge’s protest.

Impressed by the crispness of her stark, high-drama images? She was actually reputed to be a sloppy printer with bad studio habits. Sometimes we just don’t need to know how even the most beautiful sausage is made.