Daily Inspiration Quote by Imogen Cunningham

A bracingly unromantic line from someone whose work is often framed as lyrical. Cunningham slices through the myth of the artist as pure vessel and replaces it with the daily arithmetic of making a life in images. “When you do portraits professionally” sets a boundary between the private, self-directed gaze and the commissioned one. Portraiture, in her telling, isn’t where longing gets to run the show; it’s where bills get paid.

The intent is partly defensive, partly clarifying. Cunningham came up in an era when photography was still fighting for status as art, while photographers, especially women, were expected to perform gratitude for any professional foothold. By calling portrait work “for money,” she refuses the sentimental story clients (and later critics) like best: that the photographer is driven primarily by fascination with faces, by psychological intimacy, by devotion. She’s saying: don’t confuse service with calling.

The subtext is sharper: professionalism can be a kind of constraint, even a compromise. Portrait clients bring expectations, vanity, and control; the camera becomes a negotiated instrument. Cunningham’s phrasing quietly protects the sanctity of her real desires, which likely lived elsewhere - in experiment, in form, in botanical studies, in the modernist push that made her a key figure around Group f/64. It’s not that portraiture can’t be art. It’s that “professionally” changes the power relationship, and she’s honest about who’s holding the purse.

In a culture that still romanticizes creative labor as passion first and payment second, Cunningham’s line lands as an early refusal to let economics masquerade as inspiration.