Group f.64: Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and the Community of Artists Who Revolutionized American Photography
416
Group f.64: Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and the Community of Artists Who Revolutionized American Photography
416eBook
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Overview
Group f.64 is perhaps the most famous movement in the history of photography, counting among its members Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston. Revolutionary in their day, Group f.64 was one of the first modern art movements equally defined by women. From the San Francisco Bay Area, its influence extended internationally, contributing significantly to the recognition of photography as a fine art.
The group-first identified as such in a 1932 exhibition-was comprised of strongly individualist artists, brought together by a common philosophy, and held together in a tangle of dynamic relationships. They shared a conviction that photography must emphasize its unique capabilities-those that distinguished it from other arts-in order to establish the medium's identity. Their name, f.64, they took from a very small lens aperture used with their large format cameras, a pinprick that allowed them to capture the greatest possible depth of field in their lustrous, sharply detailed prints. In today's digital world, these “straight” photography champions are increasingly revered.
Mary Alinder is uniquely positioned to write this first group biography. A former assistant to Ansel Adams, she knew most of the artists featured. Just as importantly, she understands the art. Featuring fifty photographs by and of its members, Group f.64 details a transformative period in art with narrative flair.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620408674 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 11/04/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Sales rank: | 273,583 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Group f.64
Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and the Community of Artists who Revolutionized American Photography
By Mary Street Alinder
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2014 Mary Street AlinderAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62040-555-0
CHAPTER 1
OCTOBER 1932
I. EDWARD WESTON
When he looked in the mirror, which wasn't often, Edward Weston saw lines of worry creasing his tan face. His well-trimmed mustache now sprouted as many gray hairs as brown. The pit of his stomach ached with an unsettling mixture of anxieties. At the age of forty-six, long after he'd achieved international recognition, Edward was about to see his first book of photographs go on press. It was October 1932, and the publishing date was set for November. For the past three months he had held himself to the task of selecting and printing just thirty-six pictures from a lifetime of work. The process of elimination had been agonizing, and then he had toiled in his darkroom to make perfect prints. For the frontispiece, he had found a perfect quote to describe his philosophy, "If to live is to express the emotions of life, then to create art is to express the life of emotions." Now he wrestled with his artist's statement. Each word he set down on the page in his looping, bold cursive carried ominous weight. Nothing he wrote seemed quite good enough.
Because of the book, Edward had neglected his Carmel portrait studio. Summer was high season, the time to schedule sittings and to sell prints to tourists, who were scarce the rest of the year. He had made no sales during all of July and August. Since the first of September, his ledger recorded total earnings of $104. Barely solvent, he was rescued on October 6 when he opened his mail to discover a check for first prize in the California Trees photographic exhibition and competition at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. With the $100 boost to his bank account, he wistfully thought of getting away, if only for a day or two. Since he did not drive, he scribbled a quick note to his young student Willard Van Dyke offering to pay for the gas and food if Willard would drive down from Oakland and take him out to make new photographs.
Money was tight. But then money was always tight. When Wall Street imploded in October 1929, the impact on Edward had at first been minimal: he owned no stock, no house—just the corduroy shirt on his back. Like most artists, he was used to living close to the edge. By October 1932, though, the economy had deteriorated beyond anyone's imagination, strangled by rampant, chronic unemployment. In 1930, 5 million people were out of work in the United States; by 1932 that number had nearly tripled, to 13 million out of a total population of 125 million. The Great Depression worsened by the day. It felt as if it just might last forever.
Even the snug seaside village of Carmel felt the effects. In 1929 Edward had opened his studio there, finding inspiration for his work in the unspoiled natural environment, with its white sand beaches, rocky shores, and groves of twisted cypress trees. Behind, to the east, golden-grassed and oak-studded hills receded in endless, nearly unoccupied waves. Real estate developers had founded Carmel-by-the-Sea, its official name, in 1903, immediately advertising it as an artist colony. Following the San Francisco earthquake and fires of April 1906, many fled the city for this promised haven for the arts. Such an influx of writers and artists arrived that by 1910 it was reported that 60 percent of the village's residents had dedicated their lives to the arts. A bohemian group that included the writers Jack London, George Sterling, Mary Austin, Sinclair Lewis, and Ambrose Bierce and the poet Robinson Jeffers, residents lived cozily close together in small cottages. The village boasted a unique downtown that would become a mecca of California art, studios and galleries opening one after another.
Edward Weston was not the first photographer to plant his tripod on the sands of Carmel. His friend Johan Hagemeyer opened a studio in 1923, and before him Arnold Genthe, whose San Francisco studio was destroyed in the fire following the 1906 earthquake, worked there. Edward, whose intense charisma was on full display during the village's busy social season, was soon recognized as the undisputed captain of Carmel photography.
Even in good times Edward's studio had struggled financially, and by 1932 far fewer people had the means to commission a portrait by one of America's most famous photographers. He sold his creative photographs even less frequently. Although Edward believed that great art—his art—could give the viewer a rare glimpse into the deepest realities of life, most people seemed to think that what he offered was a luxury. He found the mass of humanity's insensitivity to art hugely disturbing.
Edward Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, in 1886. His parents were a prosperous couple, his father a successful obstetrician-gynecologist. But when he was just five years old, Edward's mother died of pneumonia. His lasting memory was of her intense eyes, burning with fever. His sister May, nine years older, became his very loving surrogate mother.
Photography claimed Edward in August 1902, when his father sent the sixteen-year-old to his aunt's farm in Michigan for a healthy vacation. He mailed his son a simple box camera, a Kodak Bulls-Eye Camera No. 2 loaded with one roll of film, twelve separate chances to record his experiences. Each negative measured 3 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches. Back home that autumn, Edward saved every penny, and that winter he prowled the city's parks with his new 5-by-7-inch view camera, much more serious equipment than the Bulls-Eye. He rigged up a simple darkroom. When his first image bloomed upon a sheet of photographic paper, he knew he had witnessed magic—magic that he had made. Proudly, he rushed to show the still-damp picture of a snowy landscape to his father.
In 1903, after May married and moved to Southern California, Edward dropped out; school had long been a necessary bore, but he could stand it no longer. He took a job at the Marshall Field's department store to support his increasingly expensive and demanding vocation. His father, busy with a second family, didn't put up much of a fuss.
Edward ached with loneliness for May, hoarding his earnings until he finally had enough to finance a two-month visit in 1906. While in California he fell in love with May's best friend, Flora Chandler, a schoolteacher who was seven years older, big-boned, half a foot taller, and possessed of a strong personality. But how could he propose marriage without a career, without a job? A highly motivated Edward returned to Chicago and completed the Illinois College of Photography's nine-month course in just six months, although he was denied a diploma when he refused to pay the full term tuition.
Family and commitments grew quickly: Edward wed Flora in 1909, and they lived in a simple cottage he had built on property owned by his new in-laws. Two years later he opened his own professional portrait studio in Tropico, a suburb northeast of central Los Angeles, also on land that belonged to his wife's family. (In 1918 Tropico was absorbed into the city of Glendale.) Flora gave birth to four sons: Chandler in 1910, Theodore (known as Brett) in 1911, Neil in 1914, and the "Babykins," Cole, in 1919. While Edward thought Flora was an excellent mother, as a wife she was demanding, dramatic, and given to hysteria. She would "give you her blood when all you wanted was coffee." He came to feel that she had no understanding of his internal artistic and sexual fires. The marriage foundered, but never his love and emotional support for his sons.
Edward's vices were few—women, coffee, and cigarettes—but they drove him to constant self-criticism. Coffee and cigarettes were addictions he could ill afford. Although he remained married to Flora, he found other women essential. He hoped to find happiness with just one woman, but after years of trying he had not reached that goal. With each new passion, he felt a surge of energy that recharged his creativity and enabled him to see more clearly every new object on which he focused his lens. Photography remained his first concern above all others. His priorities were clear: photography first, his four sons a close second, and women third.
As a Pictorialist—the predominant photographic style during the early years of the twentieth century in both Europe and America—Edward excelled. His images and writings began appearing in the pages of the popular photo press as early as 1911. At San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, a celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal and the city's rebirth from the devastating 1906 earthquake, he was awarded a bronze medal for Pictorialist photography for his portrait of a child. In 1916 the magazine Camera dedicated an entire issue to his work, praising his pictures because they contained "the charm which an admirably painted portrait possesses." In 1917 a British critic rated his photographs the best in the entire London Salon, where he was elected an honorary member, one of only six Americans in a total membership of thirty-seven. Increasingly showered with awards, Edward, with his growing fame, attracted new clients for portrait sittings.
Pictorialism turned out to be a wrong turn for photography, but there were reasons for its prolonged popularity. Pictorialists proclaimed that through them photography would finally be classified as an art, a question that had been raised soon after August 19, 1839, when the French government gave the invention of photography freely to the world. This momentous announcement described a difficult process invented by the Frenchmen Nicephore Niepce and Louis Daguerre. The daguerreotype produced a single positive image, incredibly sharp and amazingly detailed—if viewed at the right angle, at least—on a thin, silvery, reflective metal sheet. Immediately photography was hailed as a miracle. Through the agency of light, images of the physical world and actual people could be fixed forever with stunning clarity and accuracy: a perfect marriage of science and technology.
Almost simultaneously in England, William Henry Fox Talbot devised a way to make photographs by using paper negatives. An infinite number of prints could be produced, but the opacity of the negative compromised the image's clarity. While the daguerreotype was the immediate hit, eventually Talbot's process evolved—to glass-plate negatives and then films—to become the dominant and then only photographic practice.
From the start, a few used their cameras to intentionally make a creative image, to make art. Painters and others from the traditional arts charged that photography could never be an art because it was made with a machine. This schism began with the discipline's founders. In that same 1839, Daguerre wrote, "I have captured the light and arrested its flight! The sun itself shall draw my pictures." It could be understood from this that not the photographer but nature itself made the picture. At the very same time, Talbot expressed a far different opinion: "In what I have hitherto done, I do not profess to have perfected an Art, but to have commenced one; the limits of which it is not possible at present exactly to ascertain." Once begun, the debate about whether photography could be a fine art would not be quickly or easily won.
The next decades saw significant improvements in the photographic process; late-nineteenth-century photographers reveled in the sharply focused prints they could make from their view cameras, which produced up to an i8-by-22-inch glass-plate negative. They would place the enormous negative in direct contact with light-sensitive printing paper, expose it to light, develop, and fix. The results were amazing—the world revealed through every precise detail as it actually was, or so it was thought. The viewer could almost walk into the scene, it was so real. In America during the Civil War of the 1860s, pictures from the front lines—bodies sprawled in the twisted, awkward poses of death—were posted in newspaper office windows, bringing the war searingly home.
After the Civil War, photographers presented the exploration of the western frontier to the public in images with attention-getting immediacy. The vastness of this country, with its endless miles of flat prairie that would become the nation's breadbasket; the spectacular Wild West, with its mountains higher and canyons deeper, its lakes, geysers, waterfalls, and herds of buffalo stretching for as far as the eye could see—this was a whole new world. Photography made it believable.
Today when we look at these century-old prints, we are impressed by the crisply focused compositions expressed in broad, rich tonalities. But few contemporaries praised these photographs as art, and none graced the walls of art museums. Accused of merely replicating reality, the images were defended by the English critic Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, who countered that photographs could interpret reality.
In 1886 the British photographer Peter Henry Emerson gave a lecture titled "Photography, a Pictorial Art," proposing a style that he called "pure photography." He had come to believe that attempts at manipulating the negative or print would only result in "impure photography." For him, it was imperative to record tonal relationships as they are in nature. The term Pictorialism, taken from his lecture title, became the chosen descriptive for art photography.
In 1891 Emerson published a pamphlet, The Death of Naturalistic Photography, its cover bordered in the black of mourning, provoked vigorous arguments among serious photographers. Emerson had come to believe that a photographer could never reliably control tonal relationships as a painter could; because of that constraint, he posited, photography could never be an art.
Many photographers were convinced that if photography were to be art, more must be required. Perhaps they thought the process had become too easy. Calling themselves Pictorialists, they believed that to be accepted as art, a photograph must directly reflect the hand of man, its negative or print obviously and conscientiously manipulated by the photographer. Pictorialists used soft-focus lenses, drew in the negative's emulsion, and chose processes such as bromoil or gum oil prints that simplified tones, all to gain the effect of a charcoal, pastel, painting, or etching. The final results were often taken for anything but a photograph. To reflect the importance of this work, Pictorialist subjects had to be suitably serious. Romanticized historical characters and tableaux were seen as proper Pictorialist themes.
In further imitation of painting, the Pictorialists called their exhibitions salons, in the nineteenth-century tradition of the French Academy. In this they copied a dying tradition that had lost its relevance to avant-garde artists beginning in 1863, when the Royal Academy's salon rejected Édouard Manet's paintings. Pictorialist salons showcased photography as art, not merely as examples of technical prowess or as a recording device. The ultimate recognition in Pictorial photography was to have prints accepted into a salon or, better yet, awarded a medal. This was also the primary route to being published. In the time before photographers were honored with monographs of their work, their goal was to be included in photography magazines and pictorial annuals, which relied upon salon winners to fill their pages.
The basic problem with Pictorialism, as it was practiced in the 1890s, was that it intentionally denied photography's unique strength: its ability to produce a sharply focused, finely detailed lens-formed image. By 1900 some photographers had rebelled. The British photographer Frederick Evans wrote, "Personally I detest conundrums, and it does not seem worthwhile to have to wonder if an exhibit is a bad photograph or a worse chalk drawing." Four years later art critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote "A Plea for Straight Photography," recommending that photographs be made using little or no manipulation. Hartmann went so far as to suggest that each negative should be so well conceived that a straight print made from the negative must be its best expression. Well into the twentieth century, though, Pictorialists and their salons dominated art photography, and photography was still not recognized as a fine art.
In truth, Edward Weston was a semi-Pictorialist. A number of his early images cast a definite mood, and he romanticized his prints by using a soft-focus lens and matte, textured, and warm-toned platinum papers. He did not otherwise alter his photographs, however. By 1916 he described his prints as "straight photographs without handwork, shading or manipulation of any kind," although he exempted necessary spotting—inking over the inevitable tiny white spots caused by dust on the negative—and for many years boosted his portrait clients' egos with judicious retouching of blemishes and wrinkles.
Yet Edward grew restless. When he visited the site of his triumph at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, he found that the photography exhibit had been excluded from the Palace of Fine Arts and placed instead in the Palace of Liberal Arts, amid such scientific wonders as a giant telescope and a fourteen-ton working typewriter. Photographs had been defined once more as work produced by a machine, not created by humans.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Group f.64 by Mary Street Alinder. Copyright © 2014 Mary Street Alinder. Excerpted by permission of BLOOMSBURY.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue, ix,1. October 1932, 1,
I. Edward Weston, 1,
II. Sonya Noskowiak, 26,
III. Willard Van Dyke, 30,
IV. Imogen Cunningham, 39,
V. Ansel Adams, 51,
2. The Party, 68,
3. Group f.64, 82,
4. The Exhibition, 92,
5. Unsung Heroes, 111,
6. A Major Loss, 126,
7. The Way of Stieglitz, 135,
8. A Tale of Two Galleries, 145,
9. The Enemy Mortensen, 156,
10. Expansion, 169,
11. Divergence, 181,
12. Reaching Out, 193,
13. Relevance, 200,
14. Moving On, 214,
15. A Time to Soar, 226,
16. We Are Not Alone, 240,
17. Seeing Straight, 257,
Epilogue: After 1940, 273,
Acknowledgments, 294,
Appendix 1. Group f.64 and Closely Related Exhibitions, 1932-1940, 297,
Appendix 2. M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, Photography Exhibitions, 1930-1940, 308,
Appendix 3. 683 Brockhurst, Oakland, California, Exhibitions, 1933-1935, 312,
Appendix 4. Ansel Adams Gallery, 166 Geary Street, San Francisco, Exhibitions and Events, 1933-1934, 314,
Notes, 316,
Photograph credits, 377,
Index, 379,
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