Group F/64 - Formation and Participants

Formation and Participants

Group f/64 was created when photographer Willard Van Dyke and Ansel Adams decided to organize some of their fellow photographers for the purposes of promoting a common aesthetic principle. Van Dyke was an apprentice to Edward Weston, and in the early 1930s he established a small photography gallery in his home at 683 Brockhurst in Oakland. He called the gallery 683 "as our way of thumbing our nose at the New York people who didn't know us", a direct reference to Stieglitz and his earlier New York gallery called 291. Van Dyke's home/gallery became a gathering place for a close circle of photographers that eventually became the core of Group f/64.

In 1931, Weston was given an exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, and because of the public's interest in that show the photographers who gathered at Van Dyke's home decided to put together a group exhibition of their work. They convinced the director at the de Young Museum to give them the space, and on November 15, 1932, the first exhibition of Group f/64 opened to large crowds.

A small poster at the exhibition said:

"Group f/64 -

• Ansel Adams
• Imogen Cunningham
• John Paul Edwards
• Sonya Noskowiak
• Henry Swift
• Willard Van Dyke
• Edward Weston

announces an exhibition of photographs at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum.

From time to time various other photographers will be asked to display their work with Group f/64. Those invited for the first showing are:

• Preston Holder
• Kanaga]]
• Alma Lavenson
• Brett Weston.

This first exhibition consisted of 80 photographs, including 10 by Adams, 9 each by Cunningham, Edwards, Noskowiak, Swift, Van Dyke and Edward Weston, and 4 each by Holder, Kanaga, Lavenson and Brett Weston. Edward Weston's prints were priced at $15 each; all of the others were $10 each. The show ran for six weeks.

Photo historians generally agree that Group f/64 as an organized faction consisted of the first seven photographers, and the other four photographers are associated with the group by virtue of their visual aesthetics. In 1934 the group posted a notice in Camera Craft magazine that said "The F:64 group includes in its membership such well known names as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, John Paul Edwards, Imogene Cunningham, Consuela Kanaga and several others." While this announcement implies that all of the photographers in the first exhibition were "members" of Group f/64, not all of the individuals considered themselves as such. In an interview later in her life, Kanaga said "I was in that f/64 show with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and Ansel Adams, but I wasn't in a group, nor did I belong to anything ever. I wasn't a belonger."