Styles / Modernist

Straight photography

1917–present. New York, in Alfred Stieglitz's circle. Also called Pure photography or Group f/64.

Where the lights stand

Top light: a small soft source, 18 cm, 13 cm from the objects, about 25° to the camera’s right, 75 cm above the table.

To scale, from the render’s scene file. One way to get this light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Render of three objects on a table. One object in a dark surround, strong light from above as if through a tin funnel, so the form is modelled from the top down. — Rendered with this plan. One object in a dark surround, strong light from above as if through a tin funnel, so the form is modelled from the top down.

Render: objects on a table, in Blender Cycles, 100 mm, f/16.

Pepper No. 30, by Edward Weston, August 1930 — Pepper No. 30

Edward Weston, Pepper No. 30, 1930, printed by Cole Weston. Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States (published in 1930 without a copyright notice). Source: Pepper No. 30 at Wikimedia Commons

Sharp, unmanipulated black-and-white photographs of the thing itself: a pepper, a shell, a fence, a cliff, a machine, a face, seen close or squarely and rendered in full detail. Large view cameras stopped down to small apertures keep every plane in focus, and the print is made straight, often as a contact print from the negative, with a long scale from deep black to clean white. Strong light models form, and the frame isolates one object until it looks monumental or abstract, with no soft lens, handwork or montage.

Shoot sheet for your kit The photographs

How the look is made

Stop the lens down and keep everything sharp, from the nearest edge to the far background; never diffuse the image.
Move close and compose in the camera until one object, its form and its surface fill the frame.
Use strong directional light, hard sun or light from above, to model form and bring out texture.
Print straight from the whole negative, by contact where you can: a full scale of greys from deep black to clean white, controlled by exposure and development, never by brushwork, montage or retouching.
Look for form in ordinary things and let them stand for themselves: no props, costumes or symbols.

Shoot sheet for your kit

Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.

Step 1

Light

Key: the sun, from the camera’s left, at the side, high, hard.

Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down.

Shadow edges: Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight.
Shadow depth: Dark shadows that still hold some detail (a high lighting ratio, about 4:1 to 8:1: the shadow side two to three stops darker).
Shape & form: Light turning gradually into shade across faces and objects, so their volume shows.
Highlights: Even the brightest parts (clouds, white cloth, snow) keep texture and detail.

How the style is lit

Hard direct sun that models form and throws crisp, dark-edged shadows.
Strong light from above on a still life set in a dark surround (Weston lit Pepper No. 30 inside a tin funnel).
Open daylight on landscapes and buildings over long exposures at small apertures.

This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. The set-up at the top of the page is the one we rendered, to scale. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Step 2

Lens and settings

Start at

50 mmf/5.61/8 sISO 100

On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.

The style’s f/38 on 8 × 10 in gives about the depth of field of f/5 on full frame.
1/8 s: on a tripod.

Then: 30–75 mm · f/22–f/64 · 0.5 s–6 min · ISO 25–64 on 8 × 10 in, documented. 8 × 10 view cameras with 21–53 cm lenses, about 30–75 mm equivalent (Strand's 1916 negatives were 2¼ × 3¼ in.), stopped to f/22–f/64. Adams's Moonrise was about 1 s at f/32 on ASA 64 film; Weston's Pepper No. 30 took six minutes. Slower film speeds are inferred.

Focal length: Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
Focus: Everything sharp from the nearest stone to the horizon.
Angle: The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
Distance: Within arm’s reach: faces, hands and details fill the frame.
Crop & fill: The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame.
Duration: An unmoving scene, exposed slowly and carefully.

Step 3

Direct

People are few. Frame a sitter close, head and chest filling the frame, shoulders square to the lens, body still and hands out of sight, face composed and unsmiling, eyes into the lens or off to one side; no props or gestures. Faces in the street are caught close and unaware. No groups.

Expression: Unsmiling, composed and blank: the face gives nothing away.
Without a pose: No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).

Step 4

Style the set

Nothing is dressed up: sitters wear their own clothes and no make-up, every pore and fold sharp. A still life is one ordinary thing (a pepper, a shell, a cabbage leaf) set alone on a plain dark ground or in a simple funnel, with no props; landscapes and buildings are taken as found.

Clothes: What people happened to be wearing; nothing chosen for the picture.
Hair & make-up: No visible make-up; skin, hair and blemishes as they are.
How much is styled: Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.

Step 5

Finish

Monochrome: Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between.
Film: A view camera on a tripod: great detail, slow and deliberate.
Texture: Every surface resolved, more than the eye would see. Smooth tones with no visible grain.
Post-production: Nothing changed beyond exposure and development.
Shown as: Each picture stands on its own.

Stay away from soft focus & diffusion, gum & pigment processes, painted, scratched or drawn on, composite & montage, heavy retouching, multiple exposure, directed scene & tableau, hand-coloured, costume & dressing-up, studio props and theatrical & acted.

Before you shoot it

Strand's 1916 street portraits of poor New Yorkers, one of them blind, were taken with a decoy lens so the sitters did not know; when you photograph people up close, ask first.

Photographs that define it

From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.

The Tetons and the Snake River, by Ansel Adams, 1942 — The Tetons and the Snake River

Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942. National Archives, Records of the National Park Service (79-AAG-1). Source: The Tetons and the Snake River at U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the National Park Service

Photograph—New York (Blind), by Paul Strand, 1916; published in Camera Work no. 49/50, June 1917 — Photograph—New York (Blind)

Paul Strand, Photograph—New York, Camera Work no. 49/50, 1917. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (cph 3b46829); no known restrictions on publication. Source: Photograph—New York (Blind) at Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Photograph (Abstraction, Porch Shadows), by Paul Strand, 1916; published in Camera Work no. 49/50, June 1917 — Photograph (Abstraction, Porch Shadows)

Paul Strand, Photograph, Camera Work no. 49/50, 1917. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (cph 3b10517); no known restrictions on publication. Source: Photograph (Abstraction, Porch Shadows) at Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

With other styles

The opposite: Pictorialism. Straight photography defined itself against pictorialism: to make a picture straight, reverse each pictorialist choice, with a sharp lens, a full black, a plain unworked print and no allegory.

Pairs with New Objectivity photography. New Objectivity shares the sharp, straight print but adds frontality, plain grounds and the series; borrow its repeated method when one monumental object should become a comparable set.

Pairs with New Topographics. New Topographics keeps the view camera and the straight print but turns them on tract houses and car parks seen from a distance; use it when the sublime landscape should give way to the ordinary built one.

Sources

Straight photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_photography (sharp focus and detail; term used by Sadakichi Hartmann in Camera Work in 1904; West Coast photographers in the 1930s; Stieglitz, Strand, Weston, Adams, Brett Weston, Cunningham, Abbott; higher contrast and rich tonality in silver prints; ordinary darkroom controls allowed)
Group f/64, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_f/64 (1932–1935; the seven core members; first exhibition at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum on 15 November 1932; manifesto of 'simple, direct, purely photographic methods'; large-format cameras, small apertures, long exposures; opposition to pictorialism)
Camera Work, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_Work (no. 48 introduced Paul Strand; the final no. 49/50 of June 1917 devoted almost entirely to Strand; Strand shunned soft focus and symbolic content)
Paul Strand, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Strand (1890–1976; Wall Street 1915; Abstraction, Porch Shadows and The White Fence 1916; the false lens used for street portraits)
Edward Weston, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Weston (turn to sharp images after Armco 1922; 8×10 Seneca view camera; contact prints; Kodak Azo glossy paper; early platinum printing; 'the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself'; peppers, shells, Point Lobos, dunes)
Pepper No. 30, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_No._30 (August 1930; Ansco 8×10 camera; the pepper set inside a tin funnel and lit strongly from above; silver gelatin contact prints)
Photograph—New York (Blind), Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photograph-New_York_LCCN2002707153.jpg (LoC record 2002707153: photogravure, Camera Work no. 49/50, June 1917, plate III; no known restrictions)
Ansel Adams Photographs, National Archives: https://www.archives.gov/research/ansel-adams (National Park Service mural project, mostly 1941–1942; series 79-AA; in the public domain except series 79-G)
Pepper No. 30, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_No._30 (made in August 1930 'using his Ansco 8×10 Commercial View camera with a Zeiss 21 cm lens'; contact prints the size of the 8 × 10 in. film; Kim Weston's account of f/240 and four to six hours contradicts the daybook's six minutes)
'4 September 2019: Pepper No. 30', Edward Weston Bibliography: https://edwardwestonbibliography.blog/tag/peppers (quotes Daybooks II, p. 180, 3 August 1930: the pepper was 'so small that I used my 21 cm. Zeiss to fill the 8×10 size'; 'made an exposure of six minutes'; on 1 August 1930 another pepper took 'an exposure of 50 minutes')
Kim Weston, 'Edward Weston Photography Analysis', kimweston.com: https://kimweston.com/news/edward-weston-photography-analysis (Guggenheim kit of 1937: 8×10 Century Universal view camera, triple convertible Turner Reich lens 12, 21 and 28 in. with a Zeiss Protar element, Weston light meter, K2, G and A filters; the f/64 members habitually set their lenses to that aperture)
Ansel Anecdotes, Ansel Adams Gallery: https://articles.anseladams.com/ansel-adams-anecdotes/ (from Examples, on Moonrise, Hernandez, 1941: 8×10 camera, Cooke Triple-Convertible lens, Wratten No. 15 (G) filter, 'about 1 second at f/32 with ASA 64 film')
Porch Railings, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, MoMA Object:Photo: https://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/objects/83918.html ('Between 1915 and 1917 Strand's practice was to expose 2 ¼ by 3 ¼ inch negatives, enlarging them to 11 by 14 inch glass plates' for contact printing)
Group f/64, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_f/64 (named after a small aperture of large-format lenses; large-format cameras, small apertures and sometimes long exposures)