Invocation of Beauty: The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami

by David F. Martin

Invocation of Beauty accompanies the first full-scale exhibition of this important American photographer. Drawing almost exclusively from the family archives, the book includes many images that have been previously unpublished.

Soichi Sunami was born in Okayama, Japan in 1885 and immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty and arrived in Seattle in 1907. Initially aspiring to be a painter and sculptor, he studied with local artist Fokko Tadama and became part of the Seattle art community. During this time, he became seriously interested in photography and apprenticed with important local figures such as Wayne Albee and Frank Asakichi Kunishige. He soon found employment in the photography studio of Ella McBride, who became associated with Seattle's Cornish School in its early years. Important modern dancers such as Anna Pavlova and Ted Shawn performed in Seattle and were photographed by the McBride Studio through Nellie Cornish's connections. Many were or became major figures of modern dance.

When Sunami moved to New York in 1922, he attended the Art Students League to advance his art training. He met numerous visual artists who posed in his studio and employed him to photograph their works. Retaining his interest in modern dance from his connections in Seattle, Sunami soon began a collaboration with Martha Graham, producing some of the most iconic images of her dance performances. In 1930, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. asked him to become staff photographer at the new Museum of Modern Art. During the next thirty-eight years he produced more than twenty thousand large-format negatives for the MoMA archive and independently created an important body of work in the field of modern dance photography.

The book includes Sunami's rare, early pictorialist images of the Northwest landscape and follows his journey to the east coast where he became internationally recognized for his brilliant studies of dancers and cultural figures of the era.

This publication is distributed for Cascadia Art Museum.

144 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2018

About the author

David F. Martin is Curator for Cascadia Art Museum and the leading authority on Washington State’s art history. For over thirty years, Martin has focused on women, Asian Americans, gay & lesbian and other minorities who had established national and international reputations during the period 1890-1960.
He is the author of numerous regional books and catalogues and contributes essays and catalogue entries for national and international publications on painting, printmaking and photography.
He received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Cornish College of the Arts in 2017.


Curator and author: The Lavender Palette: Gay Culture and the Art of Washington State
Cascadia Art Museum, Edmonds, Washington: October 23, 2019 – January 26, 2020 with a condensed version of the show extended through April 5, 2020. Accompanying book released in July, 2020, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London..

Curator and author: Invocation of Beauty: The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami (1885-1971), University of Washington Press, Seattle & London.
Cascadia Art Museum, Edmonds, Washington
October 11, 2018 through January 6, 2019.

Captive Light: The Art & Photography of Ella E. McBride (1862-1965)
Tacoma Art Museum
March 17 – July 8, 2018.
Co-author of catalogue and co-curator of exhibition with Margaret Bullock.
University of Washington Press, Seattle & London.

Contributed essays for Collecting On The Edge for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah. Edited by Bolton Colburn, University Press of Colorado and Utah State University Press, 2018.

January 4, 2018: Featured speaker and panel participant at the Denver Art Museum’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art, Beyond America’s Heartland: Regionalism and the Art of the American West.



Territorial Hues: The Color Print and Washington State, 1920-1960,
Cascadia Art Museum, October 5, 2017 through January 7, 2018
University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2017.


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Making Waves: Japanese American Photography, 1920-1940, February 28-June 26, 2016; Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Opening night speaker and panel participant on March 5, 2016.

Author: A Fluid Tradition: The Northwest Watercolor Society at 75, University of Washington Press, 2015.

Lecture: Surviving Art History: Pictorialist Photography and Artistic Reputation, November 26, 2014, University of London, Birkbeck, School of Art, London, England.

Lecture and panel discussion: Inspirations – Interactions: Pictorialism Reconsidered, November 21, 22, 23, 2013, Staatliche Museum, Berlin, Germany.

Austere Beauty: The Art of Z. Vanessa Helder. Tacoma Art Museum, July 27 – October 20, 2013; O’Kane Gallery, University of Houston-Downtown, Houston, Texas, January 23 – March 6, 2014. Co-curator and co-author of accompanying catalogue with Margaret Bullock, published by the University of Washington Press.


A Turbulent Lens: The Photographic Art of Virna Haffer
Tacoma Art Museum, July - November, 2011. Co-author of catalogue and co-curator of exhibition with Margaret Bullock. University of Washington Press.
Winner of the 2012 Award for Exhibit Excellence from the Washington Museum Association.

Evergreen Muse: The Art of Elizabeth Colborne, guest curator and author of accompanying catalogue, Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA, June 17 - October 9, 2011. University of Washington Press.
Mentioned in the New York Times, April 19, 2012, “These Women refused To Stay in the Kitchen”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/art...


Shadows of a Fleeting World: Pictorial Photography and the Seattle Camera Club, University of Washington Press, 2011. Main author with additional essay by Nicolette Bromberg.
Advisor to accompanying exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, February 12 – May 8, 2011
The CASE (Council for the Advancement and