Group f.64, Rocks, and the Limits of the Political Photograph

Abstract

During the early 1930s, U.S. photographers deliberated photography’s role in illuminating and ameliorating the social crises of the Great Depression. Many photographers on the West Coast remained intent on promoting the medium as a creative art. Others, more concerned about California’s violent labor disputes, believed that photography should have a directly political objective. Intervening in these public contests in complex ways, from 1932 to 1935 the Bay Area photography collective Group f.64 exhibited “straight,” unmanipulated photographs of inanimate objects, portraits, and California landscapes, shot close-up and cropped, and with glossy surfaces. Until now, f.64 has been understood as a short-lived group that was merely concerned with sharp-focus aesthetics and led a rebellion against still-dominant, soft-focus California pictorialist photography. In contrast, this essay explores how well-known images of non-living things by Group f.64 members Ansel Adams and Edward Weston operated as political photographs in 1930s America. By considering the reception of photos picturing rocks, fruits, vegetables, and anchors in light of contemporary photography movements, as well as local agricultural and labor uprisings, this study expands the limits of what counts as a political photograph, and as socially engaged artistic practice. To this end, this project shifts the focus of f.64’s crusade away from pictorialism, and instead, investigates how visual propaganda was equally the object of f.64’s offensive.

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