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Strand and Adams had met in Taos, N. Mex., in a friend's house. Adams saw no prints, only negatives. He remembers looking over Strand's shoulder as he checked and sorted them: "It nipped me out. That was the first time I saw photographs that were organized, beautifully composed. Strand was the turning point. I came home thinking, 'Now photography exists!' " Soon afterward he met Edward Weston and saw his work. What came out of these meetings was Group f/64, formed in San Francisco in 1932, consisting chiefly of Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and Adams.
The term f/64 designates the smallest lens opening on cameras then used, the one that gave the greatest depth of focus and hence produced images that were sharp from foreground to background. To these photographers, f/64 also stood for "straight" photography, as against pictorialist fuzz. Instead of continuous tone, they went for high contrast. They also cropped and isolated their subjects: driftwood, seashells, worn rocks at Point Lobos, or the polished interior of Weston's Mexican toilet bowl.
The other big influence on Adams was Alfred Stieglitz. Adams made a pilgrimage to his New York gallery, An American Place, in 1933. There was a terrifying hour of silence; Stieglitz inspected the prints while his visitor writhed on a steam radiator, there being nowhere else to sit. Stieglitz gave Adams his benediction and, three years later, his first show. Stieglitz appeared to him (as to many other American artists, including Georgia O'Keeffe, whom Stieglitz married) as a father confessor of unfailing probity. "I am perplexed, amazed and touched at the impact of his force on my own spirit," he wrote to Strand. "I would not believe before I met him that a man could be so psychically and emotionally powerful."
In the '30s, Adams made a living from commercial work of every kind: advertising photography, industrial brochures and journalistic work for magazines like FORTUNE and LIFE. His letters to Stieglitz were full of scorn for his commercial patrons. But in the meantime he was earning, among other colleagues, a reputation as the least socially committed of serious American photographers. As Henri Cartier-Bresson once remarked, "The world is falling to pieces—and Weston and Adams are doing pictures of rocks!" Adams refused to deal with the standard subjects of post-Depression America, the breadlines, Okies, rallies and bums. When he photographed a Japanese American internment camp in California in 1943-44, the results showed not a hint of outrage. "I am ready to offer my services to any constructive government, right or left," he complained to Stieglitz, "but I do not like being expected to produce propaganda."
Adams has never repudiated his commercial photography. Like his teaching, or the extensive researches that led to his invention of the "zone" system of exposure calculation, or his 30-year association with the Polaroid Corp., commercial work helped him perfect his craft. And craft is central to Adams' achievement. The negative is the score," he likes to say. "The print is the performance."