Daily Inspiration Quote by Imogen Cunningham

Cunningham’s line is a quiet flex disguised as ethics: the photographer’s real power isn’t in glorifying a subject, but in refusing to. “Not making them into gods” is a swipe at the most persistent temptation of portraiture and celebrity culture alike: the urge to polish a person into an icon, to trade specificity for aura. She’s naming a visual economy where reverence can be a kind of erasure.

The subtext is craft. To “turn people into human beings” isn’t suggesting they weren’t human to begin with; it’s about how the camera, the lighting, the pose, the selective framing can strip away ordinary complexity and replace it with mythology. Cunningham implies that honesty is an active choice, not a default setting. It takes taste and nerve to keep a subject from becoming a monument, especially when audiences, patrons, and subjects themselves may want the monument.

Context sharpens the edge. Cunningham worked across eras when photography was alternately sold as scientific truth and as glamorous fantasy. In the 20th century, the camera helped invent modern fame, and portrait studios became factories of idealization. Her remark positions her against that assembly line. It also reads like a defense of intimacy: by declining to worship, she earns access to something more interesting than perfection - texture, vulnerability, the uncomposed moment.

There’s a democratic impulse here too. Gods don’t invite empathy; humans do. Cunningham’s point is that reverence can be another form of distance, and the artist’s job is to close it.