Daily Inspiration Quote by Imogen Cunningham

"Get it out of your historic head" lands like a slap aimed at nostalgia dressed up as expertise. Coming from Imogen Cunningham, a photographer who spent decades watching tastes harden into dogma, it reads as a refusal to let the past bully the present. The phrase is bluntly physical: history isn’t an abstract timeline here, it’s something lodged in your skull, a blockage that keeps you from seeing what’s in front of you.

Cunningham worked through eras that loved to turn art into a museum label: Pictorialism’s gauzy romanticism, modernism’s cool formalism, the canon-making machinery that decides what counts. Her own images moved from soft-focus atmospheres to sharp botanical studies and uncompromising portraits. That arc gives the line its bite. She’s not anti-history; she’s anti-historic as a pose, the kind that mistakes reference for vision and reverence for rigor.

The subtext is an argument about perception. Photography, especially, tempts people to outsource judgment to precedent: compose like this, print like that, honor the masters, repeat the “right” look. Cunningham’s command insists that seeing is a live act, not a citation. It also reads as a feminist rebuke to gatekeeping: the “historic” head often belongs to institutions and critics who use tradition as a weapon to dismiss new work, new bodies, new angles.

It works because it’s both instruction and insult, the kind of studio-floor clarity that punctures pretension. History can inform the eye; it can also fossilize it. Cunningham is telling you to choose.