Imogen Cunningham began her photography career in the Pictorialist style, which sought to imitate academic painting by employing soft focus and manipulating photographs in the darkroom. In the early 1920s, Cunningham began making radically different kinds of pictures: sharply detailed, closeup studies of plants and other organic forms. Her striking new style fully embraced the technical capacities of photography to reveal the meditative beauty of simple specimens such as this tenderly blooming magnolia flower.