Around Group f.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography

Conversations at a party in Oakland in 1932 changed the history of photography. At that gathering, several now-iconic Bay Area figures — including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston — banded together to form Group f.64, a collective dedicated to “true” photography and the rejection of the prevailing style of Pictorialism, which mimicked painting. The group’s name was technical, referring to the camera lens setting that permits the greatest depth of field, but their mission was creative: to make photographs of startling clarity and beauty that rivaled art made in other mediums. Although Group f.64 lasted for less than a year, its legacy endured, marking the Bay Area as an epicenter for modernist photography.

Around Group f.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography takes the work of this influential collective as a nexus from which to examine other local developments in the medium. The exhibition begins with a selection of pictures in the gauzy Pictorialist style, which every member of Group f.64 practiced before turning to the crisp, sharply focused compositions for which they are best known. The second gallery includes work by all eleven members of the collective made around the time they joined together. Beyond that, the exhibition branches off in related but varied directions, including an exploration of the link between Group f.64 members and the poet Langston Hughes and a presentation of contemporary artist Tarrah Krajnak’s work in dialogue with that of Weston and Adams. The final gallery serves as a visual and thematic counterpoint to those that precede it, featuring street photography from the 1970s to the present that reveals the wilder side of San Francisco.