Seeing Straight: The F.64 Revolution in Photography

Seeing Straight: The F.64 Revolution in Photography

This book is published to coincide with a major traveling exhibition, organized by the Oakland Museum, which re-creates the original 1932 exhibition by Group f.64. This San Francisco Bay Area group, which exhibited for about five years, comprised 11 members (including Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Edward and Brett Weston) and guest exhibitors who rebelled against soft-focus, sentimental pictorialism. They instead allied themselves with large-format cameras, natural light, great depth of field (f.64 is the smallest aperture on the normal lens of an 8 10 camera), sharply focused images, and well-exposed prints that required little darkroom manipulation. The book, which contains essays on f.64 aesthetics, the Modernism movement, and Adams's influence in Group f.64, gives us fine reproductions of the members' portraits (many made by other members) and of the 80 images (or similar ones) that appeared in the first exhibit. Containing new research, the book makes an important contribution to the photographic literature.
- Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, Brooklyn
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.