The Autry Museum focuses its lens at Group f/64
In the early years of the last century, photography was still finding its place as art, and many battles of form and content were won and lost along the way. For a time, the pictorialists ruled, shaping photographs with a painterly, almost dreamy touch, layering landscapes and portraits with soft edges and texture.
In 1932, a small crowd of Bay Area photographers led by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston chose another way, forming an alliance called Group f/64. They were in total opposition to the intentional obscurity and romanticism of the pictorialists, and called for an aesthetic they initially labeled “pure photography.”
To Group f/64, the natural clarity and detail offered by the camera mechanism should be embraced, not buried beneath artificial effects. Prime examples of their vision can be seen among more than 80 pictures in “Revolutionary Vision: Group f/64 and Richard Misrach Photographs From the Bank of America Collection,” opening Saturday at the Autry Museum in Griffith Park.
The vintage photographs of several members of the movement share wall space with the contemporary landscapes of Richard Misrach, who was both influenced and diverted from the dogma of Group f/64.
A period of intense creative conflict about the real and contrived in photography might be hard to imagine now, when different styles of picture-making are as interchangeable as the apps on your iPhone. But in the 1930s, photography was still a young medium, and the arguments could be heated as the form vied for a place of respect as art.
“Photography was definitely still struggling for legitimacy as a creative medium,” said Amy Scott, chief curator at the Autry, who created the show from two collections from Bank of America. “There is a lot of competitive vision, and certainly a lot of 19th-century baggage of what photography can and can’t do. It’s also the rise of modernist painting, and painting is getting a lot of attention as the vehicle of the avant-garde. Photography, being seemingly representational, was struggling to find its footing.”
The Group f/64 name was taken from the measurement signifying the smallest opening of a camera aperture, where the depth of field is at its greatest, leaving details near and far in sharp focus. Joining Adams and Weston in the Depression-era group were Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke and the youngest member, Weston’s son, Brett. Half of them remain marquee names in the history of photography more than 80 years later.
The group collaborated for just eight years, a fraction of the time Adams, Cunningham and the Westons worked as leading lights of the medium, but their joint impact was lasting.
“There is a tremendous clarity of vision and you can really sense that they are interested in putting photography out there in its own right,” Scott said. “It’s not second tier to anything. It’s not trying to mimic anything. It’s an art form, and it is uniquely able to present the world in a straightforward way.”
It’s not second tier to anything. It’s not trying to mimic anything. It’s an art form, and it is uniquely able to present the world in a straightforward way.
— Amy Scott, chief curator at the Autry Museum
The same concern for detail was consistent from Adams’ epic landscapes and Weston’s nudes. While calling their pictures “pure” or “straight” photography, the pictures weren’t without passion and poetry. There is awe and emotion in Adams’ pictures from Yosemite, while both Westons were similarly drawn repeatedly to the lush sand dunes of Oceana, Calif.
Edward Weston could also find the deeply sensual in pictures of peppers or artichokes, capturing evocative layers of light and shadow. “Adams begins with the extraordinary in a place like Yosemite, and then makes it even more so. Weston begins with the mundane and turns it into something worthy of obsessive focus,” said Scott.
“The art to them is in the selection, the composition and then the printing of the image. The camera itself produces the hardcore crisp, clean graphics that Adams becomes famous for.”
The pictorialists, led by the gifted Hollywood photographer William Mortensen, were diminished as a contemporary force by the middle of the century, though soft-focus and other effects (scratches, fog, lens flare) would make a powerful return in the grunge ‘90s. Styles of photography scattered in myriad ways, the old debates on the true purpose of the camera little remembered now. (Mortensen’s work also was the subject of a revival with the publication of two books last year by Feral House.)
Misrach’s early career was influenced by the example of Group f/64, and he has since become a leading figure in landscape photography, colliding beauty and content amid the clash of modern civilization with the natural world. At the Autry are vibrant color pictures from his series on the Salton Sea, his “Desert Cantos” images and cloud abstractions.
Combined with the black-and-white f/64 work, the show represents opposite ends of 20th-century photography, which was the crucial era of evolution and renaissance for the medium, closing at the beginning of an accelerated digital age.
“Group f/64 is very much a West Coast phenomenon. It’s very much a product of California,” says Scott. “Art in California has always been a little freer of the strictures of the East Coast, and that has granted it some unique moments in our history.”
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What: “Revolutionary Vision: Group f/64 and Richard Misrach Photographs From the Bank of America Collection”
Where: Autry Museum, Griffith Park, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles
When: Opens Saturday; through Jan. 8, 2017
Tickets: $10 general admission; students and seniors, $6; children (ages 3 to 12), $4
More info: (323) 667-2000, theautry.org
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Steve Appleford, steve.appleford@latimes.com
Twitter: @SteveAppleford
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