Seeing Plus: The Photography of Group f.64

Abstract

Although famous for launching a revolution in photography that championed hard-edged “pure” photographs of natural forms and Western landscapes against soft-focus Pictorialism, a confluence of forces motivated the establishment in 1932 of the California art photography collective called Group f.64. The society’s overarching preoccupation with photographic transparency poses questions about its affinities to East Coast and European modernist photography, its relationship to documentary photography and the Great Depression, and tests the boundaries between so-called artistic and socially concerned image making. Moreover, members’ wide-ranging interests in transcendentalist and esoteric philosophy, horticulture and nutrition, interwar race relations, and labor suggest complex humanitarian investments. Yet, existing literature on f.64 lacks a serious consideration of the group’s decidedly multifaceted practice. By examining the breadth of f.64’s endeavors and its diverse prints, this dissertation shows how a persistent concern with clarity and non-bias in photographic representation undergirded the collective’s practice, and ultimately expands conceptions of socially concerned image making in 1930s America.