produced by Pictorialist photographers who domi-
nated artistic photography during the first quarter
of the twentieth century. While Group f/64 was
neither unprecedented nor unique at the time, this
informal association, as much a social gathering as
an avant-garde movement, nonetheless holds a sig-
nificant and frequently reconsidered place in the
evolution of photographic aesthetics.
Among the photographers involved in Group
f/64 were Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham,
Brett and Edward Weston, and Willard Van
Dyke, the group’s most vocal spokesperson. Others
who participated and exhibited in the handful of
Group f/64 exhibitions were Sonya Noskowiak,
John Paul Edwards, Alma Lavenson, Consuelo
Kanaga, Henry P. Swift, and Preston Holder.
Late in the group’s lifespan, Peter Stackpole, Wil-
liam Simpson, and Dorothea Lange were invited to
take part in the group. (Although Lange, who
received technical assistance from Adams for her
work with the Farm Security Administration, never
took up their offer, it is significant that her photo-
graphs and her social documentary style appealed
to this group of modernists.)
Characteristics of Group f/64 Photographs
Group f/64’s major contemporaneous exhibition was
held at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in
San Francisco in November and December of 1932.
Museum director Lloyd La Page Rollins was an
advocate of photography and had previously exhib-
ited the work of several of the f/64 photographers.
Later exhibitions of f/64 work (prior to the group’s
dissolution) took place at small galleries run by Ansel
Adams and Willard Van Dyke in the Bay Area.
Writing in 1992, Therese Heyman characterized
the Group f/64 work displayed at the de Young:
Seen together, the images established a varied but sin-
gular point of view. For the most part, objects were seen
closely, framed by the sky or similarly neutral back-
grounds. Nothing was moving, and there was great
attention to the finely detailed surface textures of the
subjects. There was little in the photographs to suggest
either the modern industrial world or the troubles of the
times....We find images of still life, bits of landscape,
posts, bones, and sky, a few industrial buildings, por-
traits, and nudes or figure studies. The subjects were
ordinary in the sense that they were encountered fre-
quently, and yet most had a commanding presence
when photographed.
(Heyman 1992, 23–25)
Typically the photographs were made using large-
format cameras that produced 45or810-inch
negatives. With their clear-focusing lenses (as
opposed to the blurring and softening optics often
employed by Pictorialists seeking painterly images)
closed down as far as possible (f/32, f/45, f/64,
and f/90 being among the smallest apertures avail-
able), these cameras recorded a wealth of detail and
tone on black-and-white sheet film negatives. Will-
ard Van Dyke described the Northern California
environment of the early 1930s in a way that
makes the Group f/64 working habits seem organi-
cally engendered. At the time, Van Dyke wrote in
Camera Craft, before the atmospheric smog char-
acteristic of the latter part of the century settled in
upon the Bay Area, there was ‘‘a marvelous Califor-
nia light—the skies were so blue and the air was so
crisp and clean and there was a kind of hard brilli-
ance that we accentuated by using very sharp lenses
and very small apertures.’’ But historian Naomi
Rosenblum cautions that although f/64 members
sometimes referred to their work as uniquely Amer-
ican—specifically, western American—and revolu-
tionary, the fact that ‘‘the beneficent California
climate contributed a special flavor to this late-
blooming branch should not obscure the interna-
tional character of the modernist tree from which it
issued’’ (Rosenblum 1992, 34)—a tree which had
been growing since the turn of the century.Precedents and Background for Group f/64
In the early decades of the twentieth century,
and particularly in the years between the two
World Wars, there was an international ground-
swell for change and evolution in photographic
art. Then approaching the centennial of its an-
nouncement to the public, the medium and its
practitioners were undergoing a retrospective
self-consideration; the new photographers sought
to ascertain, examine, and utilize what in the
making of a picture was unique to photography.
In 1923, a Czech cultural periodical called Disk
published the following slogan, which sum-
marizes the emerging attitude and clearly antici-
pates Group f/64: ‘‘Photograph: Objective truth
and documentary clarity above all doubts’’ (quoted
in Hambourg, Maria Morris, and Christopher Phil-
lips, The New Vision: Photography Between the
Wars, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1989, p. 78). In Europe, magazines were often the
venue for the new photography. Hard-edged, cris-
ply focused images were taking the editorial and
advertising space formerly claimed by illustrators
and painterly photographs. ‘‘Visual essays’’ and
photo-reportage began to appear, taking advantageGROUP F/64