As Cunningham moved away from pictorialism to embrace sharp-focus photography she joined with like-minded photographers, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Willard Van Dyke. Together these individuals formed Group f/64 to promote a more relevant and meaningful style of photography, that rejected soft and pictorial and promoted what they called "pure or straight photography." In an interview Cunningham mentioned that the f/64 group "Is not only American, its Western American. It isn't even American. Its western." She also mentioned, "This does not mean that we all used the small aperture, but we were for reality. That was what we talked about too. Not being phony, you know."