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

Even casual fans of photography will find much to admire in Alinder’s personal, thorough examination of the photographers who made up Group f.64. This San Francisco-based group, whose members included Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, and other familiar names, forged a new path in photography in the 1930s. Their passion, as well as their exceptional work, positioned photography for the first time as a fine art form, with its own unique approach to meaning, technique, and function.

Alinder was an assistant to Ansel Adams, with in-depth, firsthand knowledge of those in his circle, and she makes for a nimble guide. She clearly defines what made Group f.64’s work so different from the prevailing style of the East Coast at the time, laying out in the Prologue exactly how the landscape of the West Coast was at the heart of the new movement’s philosophy and vision—not melodramatic or sentimental but vital, crucial, illuminating. Full of images of the photographers themselves, Group f.64 is a thoughtful, reverent recounting of a group of artists who forever changed their world.