Politics Unseen

InPolitics Unseen,Ellen Macfarlaneradically reframes the pure photographsofCalifornia art photography society Group f.64, known fordepicting 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 Unseenargues the politics of f.64's photographs become visible when interwar ideas about purityin the areas of eugenics, racial essence, nutrition, colonialism, and horticulture are interrogated. Ultimately,Politics Unseenalters perceptions not only of f.64, but also of what constituted a political image in 1930s America.