Alma Lavenson (1897-1989) was a California based photographer and member of the avant-garde photographers' group f/64 alongside artists Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and others. Born in San Francisco, Lavenson graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1919. Her early photography work was done in the Pictorialist style, emphasized by abstract forms and the aesthetics of emotion. Encouraged by Weston to shift her style to more sharply focused images, Lavenson began photographing architecture, machinery and still lifes, stressing their formal qualities.

In 1933 Lavenson had solo exhibitions at both the de Young Museum and at the Brooklyn Museum. She had solo exhibitions at SF MoMA in 1942, 1948 and 1960. Her 1988 solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, curated by Susan Ehrens, and the subsequent book Alma Lavenson: Photographs (Wildwood Arts, 1990), also by Ehrens, solidified Lavenson’s place in the history of photography. Lavenson's archive of photographs, photographic negatives and papers is housed at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson.