Lucinda Bunnen, clad in jeans and a sunny yellow shirt, scoots around the Mason Murer Fine Art gallery in white socks. She smiles as she approaches her photograph of a Cuban woman with a creased and weathered face donning a bright red hair bow — and smoking a cigar.
Bunnen, now 84, has sold more of this photograph than any other image. The woman in the photograph is relatively well known; visitors often snap a photo of the colorful woman while traveling in Cuba. But others don’t obtain what Bunnen, a local prominent photographer, caught in that singular, candid moment.
“I saw her and snapped the picture,” Bunnen said. “And it was that second, it was the moment when she was not posing.”
Over the past four decades, Bunnen’s large and diverse body of work includes landscapes (mainly trees), surreal compositions, portraits, building facades and travelogues.
Fifty of her pieces are on display through Oct. 31 at Mason Murer Fine Art gallery on Armour Drive in Buckhead.
The “Lucinda’s World” showing will feature work from Bunnen’s archives as well as several unseen works from her archive that were printed for this exhibit, including one of Gov. Jimmy Carter playing tennis and a photograph of Martin Luther King Sr. (Daddy King). In a cozy exhibit, designed to allow guests to catch a glimpse of Bunnen’s life, visitors can kick back on Bunnen’s midcentury yellow couch, flip through her scrapbooks and peruse her travel journals. Also, every visitor leaves with a free, one-of-a-kind picture from her expansive collection. All of the framed works in the exhibit, curated by Atlanta-based writer and photographer Matthew Terrell, are on sale ranging between $500 and $2,000.
Bunnen, an esteemed photo creator, collector and philanthropist, was also the subject of a recent exhibition drawn from more than four decades of giving to the High. Bunnen has donated an undisclosed amount to establish the museum’s first dedicated photography gallery. (The large wedge-shaped space is on the Wieland Pavilion’s Skyway level, the top floor in the Renzo Piano-designed expansion, adjoining modern and contemporary art galleries.)
Bunnen’s affinity for photography developed during a family trip to Peru in late 1969. She was turning 40, and didn’t want to celebrate with a party, but instead made plans to usher in the next decade with a family trip to remote areas of South America.
She made a silent Super-8 movie of the trip, capturing images of natives who had never seen outsiders before. She filmed scenes from Machu Picchu. She filmed farmers, alpacas, children fetching fresh water, barefoot villagers. Bunnen’s journey as a photographer has captured the sights and spirit of life in Atlanta and around the globe.
After returning home from the Peruvian adventure, she signed up for the first photography class offered at Atlanta College of Art in 1970.
She quickly established herself as a highly unconventional artist.
When assigned to take photos of windows, photography students snapped photos of windows in barns with red geraniums. Bunnen, meanwhile, trekked to 14th Street to snag images of a man standing in a doorway with large glass panes. She captured reflections in the windows, and she encapsulated moments of life passing by — from the bus rumbling by to the man’s reaction to the cute girl strolling in front of him.
She initially worried she might be doing something wrong, but her teacher saw Bunnen blossoming as a unique artist and he encouraged her to keep going — and keep doing what she was doing.
“Some people decide they will photograph abandoned buildings in New York City, and that’s what they do for two years,” Bunnen said. “But I am open-minded. I am not looking for anything in particular. I am just looking.”
Always within reach of her Canon, Bunnen keenly observes to seize the decisive moment — like when the clouds in the sky seem to replicate the cotton balls in the fields of the Mississippi Delta on a cool fall day, or when a cow stands perfectly still in summertime in India near the banks of the Ganges River. She also creates unique artistry by adding double exposures. And her delicate, moody images of wilted waterlilies on Hatcher’s Pond in wintertime look like abstract paintings.
When it comes to her work, Bunnen prefers to say that she “makes a picture” instead of “takes a picture,” emphasizing the role of the artist before and after the shutter blinks.
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