Group f.64

August 25, 2014
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 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.

August 15, 2014
In the 1930s, daring young artists invented a distinctive style of photography. At a party in October 1932, a group of California photographers decided to band together for exhibitions, calling themselves f.64, a name, they explained, "derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition" that defined their work. Alinder (Ansel Adams, 1996, etc.), who served as assistant to Adams, one of the most well-known members of f.64 and author of its manifesto, comes to this group biography with personal knowledge of many of her subjects, including Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston and Preston Holder. As collaborator on Adams' autobiography, she became intimately acquainted with the life and work of many of the other members. Group f.64 arose partly in reaction to Alfred Stieglitz, founder of the Manhattan galleries 291 and An American Place, who "had ruled as the largely unchallenged master of creative photography in America for three decades." Coveting "the grace of his recognition," the California group nevertheless believed that a Western aesthetic was far different from the photography heralded in New York and also from the popular genre of pictorialism: romantic, painterly images produced by soft-focus lenses and printed on matte, textured paper. The group's first major exhibition opened at the respected M.H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, mounted by its intrepid director Lloyd Rollins. Among 64 prints were Adams' rugged landscapes and Weston's sensuous rocks, shells and vegetables. Although the exhibition did not attract much notice, it inaugurated for the exhibitors a period of "explosive creativity." From 1933 to 1940, their work appeared in galleries and museums, making them increasingly visible and earning wide acclaim. Alinder's sympathetic history captures the excitement and energy of determined artists who invigorated and redefined the art of photography.

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Starred review from November 1, 2014
The California photographers who fought the good fight in the depths of the Great Depression to establish photography as an art formincluding such masters as Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, and Edward Weston, cleverly called themselves Group f.64. Because f.64, an extremely small lens aperture, or f-stop, produces a sharply focused, finely detailed image, the group's name boldly proclaimed their opposition to the prevailing style of pictorialism, in which soft focus was used to imitate the allegedly finer art of painting. These brash Westerners also challenged the reign of New York photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz.Alinder pulls together a treasury of assiduously assembled facts and her own personal memories, especially of Adams, for whom she worked as chief assistant, later becoming his biographer. Alinder is particularly revelatory in her coverage of tough and wily Cunningham, the lesser-known but no less intriguing trailblazers Willard Van Dyke, Sonya Noskowiak, and Consuelo Kanaga, and the bold museum directors and collectors who supported the group. As she chronicles the photographers' friendships, tempestuous love lives, epic parties, scrambles to survive, passionate manifestos, heated public debates, social and environmental concerns, and hard-won exhibitions, Alinder achieves an f.64 degree of crisp and commanding detail in this landmark group portrait of the visionary photographers who succeeded in forever changing our way of seeing. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)