Politics Unseen (eBook)

Group f.64 Photography and the Problem of Purity

Ellen Macfarlane (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
280 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-39976-1 (ISBN)

Infos

In Politics Unseen, Ellen Macfarlane radically reframes the "pure photographs" of California art photography society Group f.64, known for depicting Western landscapes, fruits and vegetables, flowers, and faces. By foregrounding f.64 members’ and their prints’ alliances across commercial, political, and artistic domains, the book shatters entrenched understandings of the group as disinterested in contemporary events and unseats conceptions of its prints as icons of modernist purity. Instead, Politics Unseen argues the politics of f.64’s photographs become visible when interwar ideas about "purity" in the areas of eugenics, racial essence, nutrition, colonialism, and horticulture are interrogated. Ultimately, Politics Unseen alters perceptions not only of f.64, but also of what constituted a political image in 1930s America.

Inhalt

Contents

Acknowledgments 

Introduction 
1. Group f.64 and the Limits of Political Photography 
2. “The Pure Negroid Types I Prefer”: Consuelo Kanaga’s Portraits of Black Americans 
3. The Politics of Edward Weston’s “Pure Food” Photography: Fruits and Vegetables in the Depression
4. Imogen Cunningham’s Botanical Photographs: American Horticulture and the Colonial Purification of Plants
Conclusion

Notes 
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.1.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Fotokunst
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
• Schlagworte: 1930s west coast photography • Aesthetics • american photographer movement • Ansel Adams • consuelo kanga • Documentary • Edward Weston • History • Imogen Cunningham • modernism • modernist • Nature • photographic subject • Political Art • social change • technique
• ISBN-10: 0-520-39976-5 / 0520399765
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-39976-1 / 9780520399761