In the pantheon of Californian photography, the prints of Group f.64 occupy a special place: peppers, cabbage, and callas mingle, their abstract shapes testifying to the aesthetic potential of photography. Despite being created in the early 1930s—at the height of the Depression—the group’s crisp images of vegetal matter (and the occasional portrait) have long been denied political agency. Instead, members of f.64, including Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Konsuelo Canaga, were hailed as a vanguard collective that brought about the long-desired shift from painterly Pictorialism to straight photography. Adhering to the technical standards of their label—aperture setting f.64 for the sharpest depth of field—the group’s work was among the first to be celebrated as fine-art photography and, to this day, sells for thousands of dollars at auction. The razor-sharp outlines of white lilies and the voluptuous shapes of overripe peppers became testimonies to a Modernist “revolution in photography,” articulated against amateur and commercial practices of the early twentieth century, and pursuing a straight—pure—photographic vision. Or so it seems.

Ellen Macfarlane’s long-awaited Politics Unseen: Group f.64 and the Problem of Purity unsettles this narrative. Taking the idea of “pure photography” at face value, she demonstrates how the group’s aesthetics and discourses of purity were deeply entangled with the political landscape of the Depression. Contrary to formalist readings that treated f.64 as an isolated group amid an era of political turmoil later documented by the Farm Security Administration and the Film and Photo League, the book shows how such seemingly nonpolitical photographs were very much embedded into fierce debates over political and artistic identities in the early 1930s. Across four lavishly illustrated chapters, the author convincingly argues to take seriously pictures that do not necessarily appear “political”—an undertaking that is part of a larger trend in the field to repoliticize photographic practices, be it portraits, landscapes, or still lives. To reread an appetizing print of a cabbage leaf against a lush dark background, Macfarlane suggests, means to consider the maker’s own consumption. She traces what members of f.64 read, saw, and ate, and how these everyday engagements shaped their work. The photographs were not produced in a void, but she argues, their abstract subjects “embody” (5) the sociocultural and political trends of their time. Turning away from the seductive surface of the prints to the materials and ideologies that nourished them, Politics Unseen uncovers a vast network whose tentacles reached into body, land, and race politics of the first half of the twentieth century.

From this perspective, the cherished names of California photography—canonized in photo history by Beaumont Newhall from the 1930s onward and amplified by their own mythmaking—appear in a new light. While previous scholars had already pointed to the group’s varied influences to counter the “pure” origin story of its makers and institutional supporters, Macfarlane presses further, repoliticizing much of their oeuvre. She offers multiple variations of “purity,” drawing on recent scholarship in settler colonialism, eugenics, and nutrition, to counter the makers’ self-conception of “machine-like objectivity” (9). What emerges is not simply an insistence on pure aesthetics, but on pure food and pure bodies—by no means neutral ideals, but privileged visions that masked the deeply subjective conditions of their work. Macfarlane productively extends Martin Berger’s seminal Sight Unseen (University of California Press, 2005), which contended that supposedly non-raced visual culture of the nineteenth century contains essentialist white ideologies. For f.64, she shows, the “unseen” lay precisely in the politics of purity: a blindness that reinforced their claims to objectivity all the while entangling their images in discussions of belonging, race, and health in Depression-era America.

The group’s emerging visions of political photography, as discussed in the first chapter, lay the groundwork for much of the book’s argument. Drawing on correspondence from the early 1930s, Macfarlane traces how visions of purity and “objectivity” were articulated at a moment when more overtly political photographers—such as the German émigrés Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel of the Film and Photo League—arrived in San Francisco. On the cover of Dune Forum, a leftist literary magazine of the Oceano art colonies, Edward Weston’s sand dunes suggested a retreat into nature rather than an explicit political stance. That orientation shifted, however, when Ansel Adams submitted a photograph of rusty anchors at Fisherman’s Wharf for the May 1934 issue, published in the midst of a two-month-long, violent strike on the San Francisco waterfront. Macfarlane reads this contribution as a “turning point” (47) in the group’s politics: a moment that complicated their relationship to overt activism, while maintaining their aesthetic standards. As Adams later wrote to Weston, one could find “real social significance in a rock”—a claim reinforced by the 1935 exhibition Photographs of Social Significance, which included both f.64 prints and works by more visually outspoken photographers. Navigating these new photo politics, Adams and Weston urged viewers to recognize the ameliorative potential of closely looking at natural forms.

The political events intersecting with Group f.64’s activities are put in a striking new light in the second chapter, which tackles ideas of “racial purity” in Consuelo Kanaga’s work. At the very moment of the group’s first exhibition in the fall of 1932, Kanaga and her sister were stopped by local police while driving with their African American chauffeur, Eluard Luchell McDaniel—a young man whom Kanaga would photograph repeatedly. Against the backdrop of the eugenics movement and miscegenation laws, her intimate portraits of McDaniel complicated visions of purity. Often shown in close-up with his eyes closed, the portraits of McDaniel seem to counter segregated visions. At the same time, they reveal the photographer’s privileged position. McDaniel is physically present yet passive, his personality muted. In this, Macfarlane notes, the images contain both intimacy and infantilization: on the one hand, they challenge Jim Crow laws, on the other, they seem to reenact hierarchies of power. This dynamic is countered in Kanaga’s portraits of Kenneth Spencer, a Black singer who moved to Carmel in the 1930s. Unlike McDaniel’s closely cropped face, Spencer appears sunlit and exuberant. Purity does not mean objectification here, but rather the kind of racial affirmation desired by Harlem Renaissance artists of the same period. Juxtaposing the two bodies of work, Macfarlane shows how Kanaga’s portraits navigated between racial hierarchies and more liberating forms.

Group f.64’s politics of race resurface again in the fourth chapter, this time through plants. While Kanaga’s pairing of tropical flowers with Black sitters is briefly noted earlier, here the focus shifts to Imogen Cunningham’s infatuation with botanicals. The chapter relies on a dense theoretical framing, weighed down at times by lengthy citations from period literature, but covers compelling ground: the entanglement of horticultural politics with Cunningham’s aesthetics. Macfarlane situates her fascination with plants in the settler colonial histories of the West. Growing up in the utopian Puget Sound Cooperative Colony—established on lands of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe—Cunningham tended to her own garden early on. Her flowers, Macfarlane persuasively argues, are never mere still lifes. They are embedded in imaginaries of fertility and cultivation—what she calls “the propagation of [ . . . ] California Eden culture” (191). Botanical portraits thus participate in a purified vision of the land that mimics settler ideologies, despite—on the surface—celebrating natural forms, another nod to Berger and eco-critical scholarship.

The most fascinating engagement with f.64’s “unseen politics” comes in the third chapter, which discusses the arguably most well-known series: Edward Weston’s appetizing photographs of fruits and vegetables. What the artist digested—directly inspired by “hygienic eating,” as he termed it (113)—shaped his pure aesthetics, Macfarlane provocatively argues. His prints thus become tied to nascent food movements, eugenic ideologies, and agricultural unrest. At a time when mechanized forms of food production were emerging, Weston praised unmodified foods as a solution to societal ills. Eerily echoing some of the more recent health obsessions, Macfarlane traces Weston’s dietary regimen: his preference for raw foods to eliminate toxins as well as early-morning exercise and an aversion to vaccines. Although not uncommon in California, these ideas were also linked to eugenicist discourses of bodily efficiency and a national “bloodstream” that supposedly needed “improvement” (114). Weston’s photographs of juicy fruits and freshly sliced vegetables suggest—as did Cunningham’s—agricultural plenty, despite the ongoing unaffordability of food for many Americans during the Depression. While Weston lived shielded from scarcity, he was far from insensitive to social demands. Similar to Adams’s work for Dune Forum, he photographed cabbage leaves in 1930 as lettuce workers went on strike across California’s Imperial Valley. His close-ups of intricate leaves echo the fragile human bodies harvesting these crops, once again navigating hunger and plenty.

In uncovering the food, land, and body politics underlying f.64’s work, Macfarlane does more than simply alter our understanding of “what is political about a pepper” (17). Bringing in West Coast vegetarians, horticultural societies, and Carmel’s visitor logs, she radically expands the initially small circle that upheld f.64’s grand formalist narrative. Her vigorous connections between the prints, their makers, and wider networks add new layers without diminishing the works’ beauty—as evidenced in the carefully sequenced reproductions. Crucially, as the author undoes the mythic status of f.64 as nonpolitical loners, she resituates them within a longer history of California photography, from nineteenth-century boosters to twentieth-century documentarians. This is an important and long overdue historiographical shift, one that was also on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art earlier this summer—where Weston’s shells mixed with Mieth’s Depression-era works and Pictorialist landscapes, in the same institution where, almost a century ago, Adams and a few close associates sought to articulate a much more select vision of Californian photography. Politics Unseen’s expansive primary source apparatus and the author’s productive dialogue with recent scholarship once again prove the pressing need to recontextualize West Coast photography, a genre that is anything but “pure.”