Pursuit of Clarity: Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston & the Straight Photography Movement examines the work of three lifelong friends, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston who, throughout their careers, sought to promote photography as a fine art. In 1932, their efforts converged with the founding of the collective Group f.64. Named after the smallest aperture setting on a large format camera, which could be used to produce photographs with foreground and background in sharp focus, members of this West Coast collective used their technical mastery of the camera to shed new light on the human body and on nature – particularly flowers, vegetables, and landscapes of the American West.

Straight Photography, as the style was called, provided unconventional close-up views, bordering on abstraction, to capture the exact features of the subject and the emotional experience of form. “These photographers helped popularize a style and technique that was methodical and skillfully executed—one that could carefully consider the visual properties of a variety of subjects,” writes Karolina Hac, exhibition curator and a Neuberger Curatorial

Fellow and graduate student in the Purchase College MA Program in Art History, Criticism, and Theory. While most of the Group f.64 photographers lived in California, many others in the movement traveled extensively in order to capture both vast landscapes and close-up shots of terrains. “The artists experimented with the wide range of technical possibilities of the camera with hopes of bolstering the artistic role of the photographer, and transforming the medium of photography into an art form,” Hac points out.