Art I'm Looking At: SF MOMA (March 2025)

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I stopped in at SF MOMA. I had visited only about six weeks earlier, so didn't find much new, but I enjoyed seeing a show of photography on right now called "Around Group ƒ.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography." 

The short-lived but influential Group ƒ.64 was founded in 1932 by California photographers interested in photography that was sharply focused and true to the medium – photography not pretending to be something it wasn't (Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams were three of the eleven members). 

The impetus was a reaction to the pictorialists in vogue at the time whose aim was essentially to use photography to make images that mimicked painting, using soft focus and choosing mainly romantic subjects. The pictorialists and many early photographers were attempting to establish photography as a respectable art, a status it did not at first enjoy, by associating it with high art. The ƒ.64 Group photographers had as one of their goals a firmer footing for serious photography as well, but they chose an entirely different approach. 

The name of the group comes from ƒ.64, which is the smallest-diameter aperture setting available with most camera lenses, important in this context because the smaller the aperture used, the greater the depth of field there is – that is, the broader the range of view in an image that's in sharp focus. 

The show was a bit unfocused (no pun intended). It takes the actual Group ƒ.64 photographers as its starting point, showing work by all eleven original members, and then goes from there quite far afield. There is a section looking at the relationship between the Group's photographers and the poet Langston Hughes (a connection I was entirely unaware of). 

There is a section featuring the work of Tarrah Krajnak who does self-portraits referencing work by the Group ƒ.64 photographers. Some of her photographs are shown alongside the Group ƒ.64 photographs they were inspired by. These sections were followed by contemporary photographs with a rather tenuous connection to the rest of the show – the "counterhistories" of the show's title. I thought the earlier sections more interesting. I especially enjoyed seeing original prints by the less familiar Group ƒ.64 photographers. Posted here are a few favorites from the show, which runs through July 2025, along with one or two from the Amy Sherald show that has just closed at SF MOMA. 

 

(Above: Willard Van Dyke, Boxer's Hands, silver gelatin print, 1932; Willard Van Dyke, Funnels, silver gelatin print, 1932; Sonya Noskowiak, Spanish Bottle, silver gelatin print, 1927; Sonya Noskowiak, Industrial Section, San Francisco, silver gelatin print, 1937; Tarrah Krajnak, Self-portrait as West/as Bertha Wardell (Knees), silver gelatin print, 1927/2020; Edward Weston, Knees, silver gelatin print, 1927; Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsupressed Deliverance), oil on canvas, 2014; Amy Sherald, The Rabbit in the Hat, oil on canvas, 2009)