The group of like-minded photographers located in San Francisco who came together in 1932 to form a collective with the goal of producing photographs of landscapes and other natural forms that are distinct and clearly focused. Members such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham were a part of this club. The predilection of the members of the group to use an extremely tiny aperture in order to achieve greater depth of field is alluded to by the name of the group.
The story
Group f/64 was a small group of photographers in California in the 1930s. They believed a photograph should look like a photograph, sharp and clear, not like a painting.
On 15 November 1932, their first exhibition opened at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Eleven photographers took part. The idea for the show had come about two months earlier, at a party for Edward Weston at a gallery called 683.
The name comes from the camera. The aperture is the opening in the lens that lets light in. On the large view cameras of the time, f/64 was the smallest aperture, and it keeps the whole picture sharp.
This was a challenge to Pictorialism, the main style of art photography at the time. Pictorialist photographers often used soft focus and tried to make their pictures look like paintings. Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and the other members chose the opposite. They made contact prints, where the negative lies directly on the paper, so the print is very sharp.
Weston had written down this idea years before the group existed, in his diary in Mexico City in 1924.
"The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh." (Edward Weston, diary, 1924)
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