thumb|300px|[[Ansel Adams: Half Dome, Apple Orchard, Yosemite trees with snow on branches, April 1933]]
thumb | Exhibition poster
Group or f.64 was a group founded by seven American 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (U.S.) viewpoint. In part, they formed in opposition to the pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but moreover, they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.
Background
The late 1920s and early 1930s were a time of substantial social and economic uncertainty in the United States. The United States was suffering through the Great Depression, and people were seeking some respite from their everyday hardships. The American West was seen as the base for future economic recovery because of massive public works projects like the Hoover Dam. The public sought out news and images of the West because it represented a land of hope in an otherwise bleak time. They were increasingly attracted to the work of such photographers as Ansel Adams, whose strikingly detailed photographs of the American West were seen as "pictorial testimony... of inspiration and redemptive power." These circumstances not only helped set up the situation in which a group of like-minded friends decided to come together around a common interest, but they played a significant role in how they thought about their effort. Group was more than a club of artists; they described themselves as engaged in a battle against a "tide of oppressive pictorialism" and purposely called their defining proclamation a manifesto, with all the political overtones that the name implies. 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 .
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 opened to large crowds. The group members in the exhibition were Ansel Adams (10 photographs), Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston (nine photographs each). Four other photographers—Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, and Edward Weston's son Brett Weston—were invited to join the exhibition, each contributing four photographs. Edward Weston's prints were priced at $15 each; all of the others were $10 each. The show ran for six weeks.
Some photo historians view Group as an organized faction consisting of the first seven photographers, and view the other four photographers as associated with the group by virtue of their visual aesthetics. Dody Weston Thompson reported that in 1949 she was invited to join Group . She also recounted that Brett Weston, whom she married in 1952, also considered himself a member. This suggests that an absolute delineation of membership is difficult to determine in light of the informality of the group’s shifting social composition during the 1930s and 1940s.
Name and purpose
There is some difference of opinion about how the group was named. Van Dyke recalled that he first suggested the name "US 256", which was then the commonly used Uniform System designation for a very small aperture stop on a camera lens. According to Van Dyke, Adams thought the name would be confusing to the public, and Adams suggested "", which was a corresponding aperture setting in the focal system that was gaining popularity. However, in an interview in 1975 Holder recalled that he and Van Dyke thought up the name during a ferry ride from Oakland to San Francisco.
The term refers to a small aperture setting on a large format camera, which secures great depth of field, rendering a photograph evenly sharp from foreground to background. Such a small aperture sometimes requires a long exposure and therefore a selection of relatively slow-moving or motionless subject matter, such as landscapes and still life, but in the typically bright California light this is less a factor in the subject matter chosen than the sheer size and clumsiness of the cameras, compared to the smaller cameras increasingly used in action and reportage photography in the 1930s.
The even sharpness corresponds to the ideal of straight photography which the group espoused in response to the pictorialist methods that were still in fashion at the time in California (even though they had long since died away in New York).
Manifesto
Group displayed the following manifesto at their 1932 exhibit: