Daily Inspiration Quote by Imogen Cunningham

The line lands like a half-laugh that stops short. Cunningham starts with the expectation of a juicy confession - “I could fill several volumes” - then yanks it away with “I don’t know,” a shrug that’s less uncertainty than self-protection. It’s a photographer’s dodge: reveal the truth of others for a living, keep your own at a careful exposure.

The “greatest torture” isn’t simply that clients are difficult (though the phrase “nice nasty stories” hints at vanity, entitlement, and the small humiliations of sitting for a portrait). It’s the moral and aesthetic bind of portraiture itself. A portrait asks for intimacy under artificial conditions: lights, poses, time limits, a subject performing “themselves” while the photographer hunts for something unperformed. Cunningham’s tease about “volumes” signals how routine this friction is - the portrait studio as a steady factory of micro-dramas - but also how unglamorous the labor can be behind an art we like to romanticize.

Context matters: Cunningham moved between commercial work and the modernist West Coast circle around Group f/64, where “straight” photography prized clarity and form over sentiment. Her answer carries that ethos. She won’t indulge the myth of the suffering artist or the easy gossip of the professional observer. The subtext is control: she acknowledges the temptations (cruelty, judgment, the deliciousness of complaint) and refuses them. In that refusal, she sketches the real discipline of portraiture: staying sharp, staying humane, and not letting the client’s performance - or your own cynicism - become the final image.