"The camera should be used for a re-cording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh." So wrote Edward Weston, an American photographer who would go on to be recognised as a 20th-century master, in 1924. Turning away from pictorialism-the previously dominant, painterly style of photography that emphasised soft-lensed craftsmanship-Weston made images that astonished Europeans at an exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929. Three years later, united in a belief that photography should show the world "as it is", devoid of shading or manipulation, Weston and Ansel Adams formed an association of like-minded snappers, Group f.64. This first full-scale biography of the group focuses on how a zealous band of San Franciscan photographers revolutionised ways of seeing in the early 1930s.
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