of photography’s unique visual language. The
course of avant-garde discovery sometimes led
down paths tending toward the unconventional
and the abstract (see the disorienting views of Alex-
ander Rodschenko and La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy), but
it also included the startlingly frontal formalism of
Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt, whose
work complimented that of the painters in theNeue
Sachlichkeit(usually translated as ‘‘new objectiv-
ity’’) movement, and Man Ray, whose concentra-
tion on objects was surreal in its precision. August
Sander made the transition from painterly portrai-
ture to the objective ‘‘exact photography’’ he adver-
tised in the late 1920s. The ruling principle of the
new vision was that it was rooted in twentieth cen-
tury technology.
Writing in a 1963 Artforum review, Margery
Mann suggests that the emerging modernism of
photographic exactitude may have had a revolu-
tionary, social genesis. She describes the interest in
clarity as ‘‘the completely honest penetration of
reality,’’ and asserts that the photographs and
photographers emerging during the early 1930s
‘‘represent a break with the past; they see the
world afresh because the country was in dire
straits. Problems required solutions; traditional
ways of thinking were not to be trusted.’’ She
was specifically addressing Group f/64 in Califor-
nia, but her ideas had parallels across the country
and across the ocean. Among the artists exempli-
fying the new photography in the United States,
anticipating f/64’s emergence, were: Paul Strand,
who made precisely detailed, close-up images of
industrial objects, street people, and his wife
Rebecca throughout the 1910s and 1920s; Ralph
Steiner; and Paul Outerbridge, Jr., whose crisp
images of clothing placed him among the leaders
of a shift in advertising imagery towards the
elegant simplicity and factual clarity of the Pre-
cisionist style and away from Pictorial sentimen-
tality and soft-focus excess, as represented in
publications by the photographs of Baron Adolf
de Meyer and Edward Steichen’s early commer-
cial work.
The aesthetic credo of Group f/64 was directly
anticipated in the United States in a 1930 exhibi-
tion organized by Lincoln Kirstein at the Harvard
Society for Contemporary Art. About the work in
his show Kirstein wrote ‘‘[it] attempts to prove
that the mechanism of the photograph is worthy
and capable of producing creative work entirely
outside the limits of reproduction or imitation,
equal in importance to original effort in painting
and sculpture.’’ (Hambourg 1989, 44–45) In his
exhibition Kirstein presented work by artists who
had received support and endorsement from Al-
fred Stieglitz, including Strand and Charles Shee-
ler, and other photographs by Berenice Abbott,
Walker Evans, Ralph Steiner, Euge`ne Atget,
Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, La ́szlo ́ Moholy-
Nagy, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, and Doris
Ulmann, among others. Kirstein was influenced
by and included examples of press photography,
scientific and cartographic images, and medical
X-rays. The democratic inclusion of photographs
outside the usual definition and practice of ‘‘art,’’
with a particular focus on images published in
popular periodicals, was a defining feature of
the importantFilm und Foto exhibition held in
Stuttgart, Germany, in 1929 that Kirstein carried
forward in his show. Many of the photographers
Kirstein displayed at Harvard also appeared in
the German exhibition.Relationship to Pictorialism, Stieglitz
Much of Group f/64’s activity took place at 683
Brockhurst Street, a studio in Oakland that, ironi-
cally, was formerly occupied by Anne Brigman, a
leading Pictorialist photographer; Willard Van
Dyke had been an assistant for Brigman, and rented
her studio from her after she moved to Southern
California. Following the de Young exhibit, and
after the departure of Rollins from his museum
post in April 1933 created a need for a new advocate
of f/64-style photography, Van Dyke started run-
ning a gallery out of the Brockhurst Street location.
He referred to the gallery as ‘‘683,’’ very conscious
of the presence and importance of ‘‘291,’’ Alfred
Stieglitz’s New York gallery (founded in 1905) that
fashioned itself as the world headquarters of mod-
ernist art and photography.
All precedents and parallels notwithstanding,
the members of Group f/64 considered themselves
and their aesthetic philosophy revolutionary. They
rejected Pictorialism out of hand, and, in part
because of their resolute attachment to the West
Coast, also resisted the standards represented by
Alfred Stieglitz in his eastern stronghold. The
struggle with Pictorialism was carried out in pub-
lic, largely in the pages ofCamera Craftmagazine
in a series of written exchanges between 1933 and
1935 by Van Dyke, Adams, and William Morten-
sen. Prior to editor Sigismund Blumann’s May
1933 review of Group f/64’s exhibition at the de
Young, the San Francisco-based Camera Craft
had been a popular magazine dedicated to the
reigning style of Pictorialism, largely voiced by
Mortensen. But when Ansel Adams was invitedGROUP F/64