Carefully composed and sharply focused, Imogen Cunningham’s photograph captures all the sensuous detail and patterned complexity of a magnolia blossom. Extolling the camera’s ability to capture the forms of the natural world with clarity and precision, Cunningham soon joined like-minded West Coast photographers, including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, in forming Group f/64. The group’s members were united by their modernist conception of photography grounded in the medium’s inherent qualities, in sharp contrast to the previous generation’s softly focused Pictorialist work, which they viewed as sentimental and derivative of painting and earlier art forms.