Politics Unseen

Group f.64 Photography and the Problem of Purity

Ellen Macfarlane author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:7th Jan '25

£42.00

Supplier delay - available to order, but may not be available until after 4th February 2025.

Politics Unseen cover

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.

ISBN: 9780520399754

Dimensions: 254mm x 178mm x 20mm

Weight: 907g

280 pages