AUGUSTA, GA.- Modern Masters: Group ƒ/64: Works from the Bank of America Collection opened to the public on Saturday, April 27, 2019. The exhibition features forty-four photographs by five legendary members of Group f/64—Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston—who are regarded as some of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. It remains on display through Sunday, July 21, 2019 and will be celebrated at a public event on Thursday, May 2, 2019.

“We’re proud to deepen our commitment to the arts and continue our partnership with one of our local cultural treasures, the Morris Museum of Art, by presenting Modern Masters: Group ƒ/64: Works From the Bank of America Collection,” said Ora Parish, Augusta Market President for Bank of America. “At Bank of America, we believe in the power of the arts to help economies thrive, educate and enrich societies, and create greater cultural understanding.”

“All of us at the Morris are pleased by this opportunity to work with the good people at Bank of America to bring this beautiful exhibition to Augusta,” said Kevin Grogan, director of the Morris Museum of Art. He added, “The work is exceptional and illustrates a fascinating chapter in the history of photography in America.”

Founded in 1932, Group ƒ/64 was an informal association of San Francisco Bay Area photographers who were devoted to exhibiting their work and promoting a new direction in photography. This small band of innovators named their organization Group ƒ/64 after the large-format-camera aperture that produces the maximum depth of field so that everything from the immediate foreground to the distant background is in sharp focus, yielding crisp, graphic compositions. The group was established as a challenge to pictorialism, a popular movement begun in the late nineteenth century that favored painterly, hand-manipulated, soft-focus photographs, often made on textured papers. On November 15, 1932, the work of eleven photographers was shown in a major exhibition at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Modern Masters features five of the most important members of this group. The association disbanded in 1935, when California, like the rest of the nation, felt the effects of the Great Depression, but many ƒ/64 members continued to photograph.