Tenaya Lake, High Sierras

Unlike the soft-focus pictorialist cityscapes by Coburn and Stieglitz on view in this room, Weston’s Tenaya Lake celebrates a direct presentation of natural forms. Along with fellow West Coast photographers Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams, Weston was a founding member of the group f/64, which advocated for unmanipulated, sharp-focus photography. (The group’s name refers to a small aperture setting for the camera that will provide the most depth of field, rendering a photograph that is evenly sharp from foreground to background.) In a manifesto displayed in their first group exhibition in 1932, the photographers presented their aesthetic as absolute: "The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form."