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Seeking to determine the particular aesthetics of photography,
the American Berenice Abbott and the Frenchmen Eugène Atget,
André Kertész, and Henri Cartier-Bresson developed
intensely personal styles. The exponents of surrealism in France
and of futurism in Italy and the various German art movements that
were focused in the Bauhaus all explored the medium of photography.
The international exhibition Film und Foto, held in
Stuttgart in 1929, helped to make formal a purely photographic aesthetic.
The works exhibited combined elements of functionalism and abstraction.
Photographic subject matter shifted from the past to the presenta
present of new forms in machinery and architecture, new concern
with the experience of the working classes, and a new interest in
the timeless forms of nature.
In California during the 1920s and 30s Edward Weston and a handful
of kindred spirits founded the f/64 group, taking their name from
the smallest lens opening, that which provides the greatest precision
of line and detail. This small and unofficial groupwhich included
Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Willard Van Dykecame to
dominate photographic art, overshadowing the pictorial aesthetic.
They and their imitators eschewed all post-exposure handwork, and
worked with 8 × 10-in. view cameras in order to obtain the
largest possible negatives from which to make straightforward contact
prints. They limited their subject matter to static things: the
still life, the distant or closely viewed landscape, and the formal
portrait. The influential teacher Minor White became known for his
poetic, visionary work related in technique to this straight approach.
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