Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was known for his black and white photographs of the California's Yosemite Valley. Adams was also the author of numerous books about photography, including his trilogy of technical instruction manuals (The Camera, The Negative, and The Print). He co-founded the photographic association Group f/64 along with other masters like Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and others. He invented the zone system, a technique which allows photographers to translate the light they see into specific densities on negatives and paper, thus giving them better control over finished photographs. Adams also pioneered the idea of visualization (which he often called 'previsualization', though he later acknowledged that term to be a redundancy) of the finished print based upon the measured light values in the scene being photographed.

AKim KirbyMay 31, 2019Male, Photographer, 1900s, American Photographers, Ansel Adams, Group f/64, Summer in Carmel

Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham occupies a singular position in the history of American art of the twentieth century. For over half the history of photography, she explored- with innovation and a new perspective- all the major traditions associated with the medium as fine art. She has been most widely acclaimed for the photographs made during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly close-up images of plants and nudes. She also made portraits which are now considered classics in photography, including images of Alfred Stieglitz, Spencer Tracy, and Martha Graham. She was a founding member of the West Coast-based Group f.64, which championed an un-manipulated, direct approach with the camera, or “straight” photography. Her photographs are represented in major collections and museums around the world. The Weston Gallery represents the Imogen Cunningham Trust and have vintage, modern as well as posthumous prints available.

CKim KirbyMay 31, 2019Female, 1900s, American Photographers, Imogen Cunningham, Group f/64

Sonya Noskowiak

Born in Leipzig, Germany, Sonya Noskowiak spent her upbringing in Chile, Panama, and California. At the age of 19, she started her photographic career in 1929 assisting Johan Hagemeyer. She then went on to work with Edward Weston based in Los Angeles, printing Weston's commercial work for him. She lived and worked with Weston from their meeting until 1934. Noskowiak along with the likes of Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams all worked with large format cameras using the f-stop which allows the sharpest focus and detail at this smallest aperture, f-64, which was the basis for Group f-64's foundation. Their push away from pictorialism showcased works of high contrast and modern abstractions of typical and atypical forms and subject matter.

Noskowiak exhibited her work in the first Group f-64 show at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in 1933 and went on to take part in several one woman and group exhibitions gaining much critical acclaim. She opened her own studio in 1935 in San Francisco where she worked until 1965. A large archive of her work is held at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. In 1992 The Oakland Museum published a book entitled, Seeing Straight Group f/64.

NKim KirbyMay 31, 2019German, Female, Sonya Noskowiak, Group f/64

Brett Weston

Brett Weston may be said to be the first successful artistic heir in the history of photography. The son of Edward Weston, Brett was taught the basics of photography by his father at the young age of fourteen, and set out on his own from that point on. At sixteen he had his first one-man show, and received international recognition at eighteen when a score of his photographs were displayed in the legendary “Film und Foto” exhibition of 1929 in Stuttgart. By the age of twenty, his photographs were on view in major shows in the US, Europe, and Japan. Since then, Weston’s photographs have been featured in hundreds of exhibitions around the world, and are staples in the collections of leading museums and galleries including the Getty Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, George Eastman House, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum among others. Concerned with the elemental mass of forms, he is known for his great abstractions; he is also generally acknowledged as one of the finest printers in the medium.

Edward Weston

Edward Weston, an American photographer was born in Highland Park, Illinois. Weston began to make photographs in Chicago parks in 1902, and his works were first exhibited in 1903 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Three years later he moved to California and opened a portrait studio in a Los Angeles suburb. The Western landscape soon became his principal subject matter. In the 1930s, Weston and several other photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard van Dyke, formed the f/64 group, which greatly influenced the aesthetics of American photography. In 1937, Weston received the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer, which freed him from earning a living as a portraitist. The works for which he is famous–sharp, stark, brilliantly printed images of sand dunes, nudes, vegetables, rock formations, trees, cacti, shells, water, and human faces are among the finest of 20th-century photographs; their influence on modern art remains inestimable.

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