Group f.64: Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and the Community of Artists Who Revolutionized Photography

In this lively group biography about the California photographers known as Group f.64, Alinder (Ansel Adams: A Biography) tells a distinctly West Coast story about an ambitious, broad-minded, and unusually diverse movement. Originally founded at a party in Berkeley, Calif., in 1932 by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke, among others, Group f.64 advocated for “straight” photography over pictorialism’s painterly affectations. Starving for recognition, they promoted western photography when nobody else would (including prominent photographers like Alfred Stieglitz). Group f.64 embraced landscapes and portraiture, documentary, and even commercial work. Though the author emphasizes that women were welcomed from the very beginning, she notes, “not one of [the women] wrote letters, articles, or books on the group,” without exploring the reasons why. Alinder, who studied under Adams and later worked as his assistant, smoothly alternates between many individual careers while still maintaining a cohesive group narrative. She follows Weston’s love affair with photographer Sonya Noskowiak; Adams’s tirades against the pictorialist William Mortensen and his attempts to win over Stieglitz; and Van Dyke’s transition from still images to social documentary film. Admiring how the group “propelled themselves into the general culture,” Alinder claims Group f.64 guaranteed the status photography now holds as a respected art form. While that distinction is thrown about all too frequently in these pages, she makes a good point. Agent: Victoria Shoemaker, Spieler Agency. [em](Oct.) [/em]