This exhibition is the result of two generous gifts to The Huntington from Alma Lavenson's son Albert Wahrhaftig. Susan Ehrens, photographic historian and Administrator of the Alma Lavenson Family Collection facilitated the gift.

Lavenson's work encompasses three major trends in American photography during the first half of the twentieth century: Pictorialism, Modernism, and the desire to document a changing America. Her subjects varied from landscapes to gardens, industrial sites to abandoned mining towns, but she consistently emphasized composition and design.

Lavenson began taking photographs after graduating from Berkeley in 1919. At first she was enamored with soft-focused Pictorialist photography. Proponents of Pictorialism strived for images that resembled Impressionist paintings. In 1927, Photo-Era, a leading photography magazine, published one of Lavenson's Pictorialist photographs on its cover, bringing Lavenson her first success.

In 1930 Lavenson met Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston, who challenged Pictorialism with their sharply-focused "straight" style. They advocated objective, realistic photographs that were not manipulated in the darkroom, thus the term "straight." Their tightly composed, abstracted images served a pivotal role in developing American Modernist photography. Lavenson adopted a "straight," Modernist style in 1931.

The members of Group f/64-including Cunningham, Weston, and Ansel Adams-invited Lavenson to participate in their groundbreaking 1932 exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. The purist style of the photographs in the show had a lasting impact on American photography.

In 1933 Lavenson began a major series of documentary photographs of the Mother Lode region of California, focusing on the remnants of towns built during the Gold Rush. The project occupied much of her energy for two decades.

Major museums exhibited her work in group and solo shows, but her images have entered public and private collections more slowly than those of her peers. In part this was because she considered photography an avocation, retaining the traditional values of her parents who discouraged her from pursuing a career. Lavenson has gradually gained the reputation she so richly deserves as a pioneering Modernist photographer.