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.
Politics Unseen Group f.64 Photography and the Problem of Purity
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Reviews
"Macfarlane provocatively upends the standard myth that Group f.64 was uninterested in the political. By showing how the photographers’ ethos of 'purity' constituted a deeply political stance, she reveals just how much the photographs were embedded in the politics of their day. An archivally rich, beautifully written, groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the era’s photography."—Cara A. Finnegan, author of Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs"The account of the influential Group f.64 we’ve been waiting for! In a compelling, complex study of modernism that expands our understanding of photography and the political, Macfarlane captures the texture of the interwar era, examining the seemingly mundane affairs of artists—Edward Weston’s diet, Imogen Cunningham’s fertilizer chemistry—as they intersect with debates on race, labor, settler colonization, technology’s role, and human subjectivity, which resonate into the present."—Lauren Kroiz, author of Cultivating Citizens: The Work of Art in the New Deal Era and Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle
"Politics Unseen is an important and timely volume, with lessons for our age. Ellen Macfarlane challenges us to reconsider the political possibilities of form. How might an image of hard-won artistic beauty strengthen and soften our entry into social and ecological worlds? How might aesthetically improved vision encourage our moral transformation, and do so without anesthetizing our outrage? These concerns feel as urgent as ever in Macfarlane’s account of 1930s California photography, told with vibrant new detail, sensitivity, and nuance."—Jennifer Jane Marshall, author of Machine Art, 1934
"Ellen Macfarlane’s excellent new book is a must-read for anyone interested in Depression-era photography in the United States. Group f.64 is almost always described in terms of art photography and technique, but as Macfarlane points out, f.64 members were deeply engaged politically, and in fact understood their work as providing a way to see politics. This analysis, smart and cogent, opens up a whole new way to think about what socially engaged photography means in the United States—never has it been more important to understand how politics can be pictured and, at the same time, remain unseen."—Terri Weissman, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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