Along with Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams, Alma Lavenson was a member of Group f/64, a San Francisco-based photographic organization dedicated to a new aesthetic of sharply focused, carefully composed images. Unlike the other f/64 photographers who chose the natural world as their primary subject, Lavenson gravitated toward the industrial, as with the large oil tanks pictured here. According to the artist, “I never took them as machinery. I always saw them as a composition of some sort.”