In 1932 Sonya Noskowiak was one of seven San Francisco–based
photographers, including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, who formed Group f/64.
They advocated a pure, sharply focused style of photography that captured the beauty
of the real world—not the Pictorialists’ soft-focus imitation of painting.

Noskowiak’s
nearly abstract composition of sunlit, angled rooftops reflected the real world
in another way as well: the northern California lumber mill that once hewed the
region’s giant redwoods into millions of railroad ties for the Southern Pacific
Railway had closed in 1929 and lay idle, a melancholy casualty of the Great
Depression.