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The connection between the early work of Robert Cumming and that of William Wegman has not been widely remarked—a surprising fact, given the two artists’ long friendship, their similar backgrounds and the complimentary sensibilities of their photographic work of the late sixties and early seventies. The two attended college together in Boston; they did not get to know each other well, however, until by chance they applied to the same graduate school, the University of Illinois, from which they graduated in 1967.

Again by chance, both got teaching jobs at the University of Wisconsin. At first they worked at different campuses, but in 1969 Wegman came to Madison, where Cumming was based; that year they shared a studio. In yet another “total coincidence,” as Cumming tells it, he got a job as Assistant Professor at California State College, Fullerton (as it was then called), just as Wegman was hired as a Lecturer at the Cal State campus in Long Beach, fifteen miles away.¹

Wegman admits that the two responded to “a certain kind of gallows humor,” but Cumming says their artistic interaction didn’t go much beyond that: “It was just something you shared in the studio with somebody… We didn’t have that sort of relationship where you would intellectualize about what you were doing. It was something that was kind of natural.”²

Unlike Wegman, Cumming took photography seriously as an art form early on. At Illinois he studied with Art Sinsabaugh, one of the great classic landscape photographers. He learned impeccable technique—which may have slowed his acceptance in the Conceptual art arena, with its penchant for grainy photographic jottings.

Cumming’s primary photographic tactic has been to make things which might then be pictured (a radical difference from Wegman’s early work, where the nominal “subject” is generally incidental). His 120 Alternatives, 1970, is an example of early work, a hybrid photograph/sculpture/print that challenges generally held assumptions regarding art media. Cumming hit his stride a few years later with works life Fast and Slow Rain, 1974, and Walking Shoes Turned Momentarily in Profile, 1975, which present elaborate sculptural fabrications as elegant photographic lies.

1. Robert Cumming, interview with the author, Whately, MA, 24 October 1991; also useful were the resumes of the artists and the biography in Lisa Lyons and Kin Levin, Wegman’s World (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1982), 76. ↩︎
2. Lyons, 8; Cumming interview with the author. ↩︎