The View from Here is a sprawling exhibition shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from January 16 to June 27, 2010. It consists of 275 prints surveying the history of California photography, mostly in black and white and picked from the museum’s own collection in conjunction with promised gifts from the Sack Photographic Trust. It represents a view that is interestingly conventional, focusing on photography by photographers and steering clear for the most part of the contemporary cross-over artists. There are few mixed-media works in the show, and artists who enhance photographs with drawings, collage, or writing are more the exception than the rule.

There is no question that the show is unabashedly about California, but its curator, Erin O’Toole, makes clear that this not a regional, self-absorbed milieu but a cosmopolitan receptacle of ideas from everywhere. By their very nature, photographers never sit still, look around, and keep experimenting. They may carry their own baggage, but choose to rummage throughout the world. In California, as well as anywhere else, they feel the shocks and tremors that periodically alter the broad expanses of the art world. Their response is transformed by these experiences but is also rooted in the geography, geometry, history, and anthropology of the region, and has generated a body of work that is entirely unique.

What kind of narrative does The View from Here weave? The short answer is: this is the history of modernity. This story is at the heart of SFMOMA’s collection of photography, and it began almost as soon as the museum opened its doors in 1935. But there is a subtext to the exhibition as well: photographers are not isolated from the subjects they capture, and their points of view have shifted as their society changed from its frontier days to our present of freeways, suburbs, and climate predicament.

This story begins in mid nineteenth-century San Francisco, when everybody was from somewhere else, in search of fortune, fame, or a fresh start in life. Photography was at its earliest; it consisted of small, darkish, perfunctory daguerreotypes—a means to keep track of formalized memories to send back home. Already in the 1860s, however, photographers such as Carleton Watkins began documenting the transformations taking place in San Francisco. This city was more an ambition than a reality: a grid of streets laid out with few hastily and cheaply constructed buildings. But Watkins’ early views of the city also convey the sense of a place with the clearest light, proximity to water, and the recognition of a manifest promise.

Carleton E. Watkins. The Golden Gate from Telegraph Hill. ca. 1868

What such photographers were most interested in portraying was the power of imagination. Even Watkins’ images of an untouched Yosemite Valley represented a world to be conquered. But power came at a price; as they photographed the rising city, they also illustrated the toll that such expansion excised from the surrounding old-growth forests of giant redwoods. Rather than evidence of natural devastation, they saw it as an epic feat of human dominance over nature.

Of course, these were the themes that inspired painters as well, but painting represented the established conventions, and photography seemed particularly well suited to record the emergent society. Yet photography was still viewed as inferior to painting, and many photographers longed to be recognized as artists. Pictorialists, as they were called, assumed the manners and even some of the techniques of painters. But theirs was a motley group, and they fit uncomfortably in the limited space assigned to them in the show.

One of the early pleasures in the show is Arnold Genthe’s street impressions of the Chinese living in San Francisco, ca. 1900s. Given the large-format equipment of the time, and the long exposures it required, these images seem remarkably candid, and they include details that had more to do with the framing of the plate in the camera than with painterly compositions. Then there is Eadweard Muybridge, whose 1878, 360 degrees view of San Francisco from the top of Nob Hill is included here, instead of his better known, obsessively recorded experiments in stop-motion photography. Muybridge had little time for painting. He thought of himself as a scientist, but the painters of the time learned a lot from his photographs.

Alfred Stieglitz cast a long shadow over American photography, and although his work is not part of the exhibition, its influence becomes apparent in the photographs of the 1920s shown here. Stieglitz called for a new way of seeing  through the camera that was independent from any other art and not far removed from the Neue Sachlichkeit of European artists. He mentored many photographers, some from California, and Camera Work, the periodical he published from New York, was well received.

Johan Hagemeyer, a native Dutch who resettled in San Francisco via New York where he met Stieglitz, shows photographs that rely on the specific dimensions, geometric properties, and light qualities of the photographic plate instead pursuing similarities with painting. He was, in a word, modern.

In the mid 1930s, the San Francisco photographers of Group f.64 invented nothing but changed everything. They took their name from the smallest aperture available in a camera lens which intensified clarity and depth of field over the entire frame. They selected what was commonly accessible in the social and physical environment of California—from sweeping landscapes to driftwood and smokestacks—and sublimated it to a new order of symbolic representation. Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham raised a divide in the history of American photography; there was photography before them and after them, and the two were not the same.

In The Painter of Modern Life Charles Baudelaire wrote “The crowd is his domain.” The modern artist does not consider the crowd analytically from a safe distance, but “moves into the crowd as though an enormous reservoir of electricity.”

The quintessential modern artist of the crowd was Dorothea Lange. There were street photographers before Lange, such as Eugène Atget, who illustrated the lesser known angles of Paris, and contemporaries such as Walker Evans, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, younger by a few years, or John Gutmann, who is also included in the exhibition. Lange, a transplanted New Yorker and a member of the Group f.64, was neither the best known nor the most articulate in this category, but she infused her work with a unique degree of compassion for the neglected side of humanity and a dramatic, nearly operatic emotion. She did so with the softest of visual touches.

Ansel Adams. Clouds, from Tunnel Overlook, Yosemite National Park, California. ca. 1934.

Dorothea Lange. White Angel Breadline, San Francisco. 1933.

It’s hard to overestimate the influence the Group f.64 wielded on the development of photography in California as well as abroad. They taught, wrote, and published periodicals, and were the subject of innumerable exhibitions. In recent times they have also been the subject of TV documentaries in the United States and overseas. Their photographs became the iconic images of the West; no one could snap a shot of Yosemite or Big Sur without thinking of their work. For as long as they lived — and many photographers are blessed with longevity — their work kept evolving, as the California landscape altered.

 Minor White. The Pacific. 1947

 Robert Adams. Santa Ana Wash, San Bernardino County, California. 1982

Minor White, Wright Morris, and, a generation later, Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz among others, chronicled such changes. White, in particular, known for his Zen-like approach to photography, edited everything out of the frame except the most essential elements to conjure up a vanishing pastoral world. Its arresting purity disguises the mourning for a lost innocence. His world is no longer the sensual one of Imogen Cunningham’s or, for that matter, Ansel Adams’ photographs. It lacks their energy and optimism. They were looking at the future; he is looking at the past.

Billboards, gas stations, trailer parks, and fast-food franchises — the entire gamut of today’s roadside attractions — were never in the frame of the photographers of the Group f.64. But they are precisely the subject of Robert Adams’ photographs. Who says that beauty can’t be found on the fringes of the modern environment? Admiration as well as revulsion is in Adams’ photographs, recognition of how much the landscape had changed and, ultimately, a rejection of these changes. Why would this be a modern, instead of a post-modern, reflection on the state of being? Because his images, for all their squalor, somehow undermined by his typical blindingly light, overexposed printing technique, trigger an activist streak: now that we know how things are, we should do something about it.

Not all artists inherited the Group f.64’s obligation for flawless craftsmanship of exposure and printing. In Southern California more than anywhere else, the experimental pop artists of the 1960s shrugged such requirements off as irrelevant. They restricted their work neither to a particular medium nor a particular technique. Ideas and concepts were more important than accomplished results. Many of the artists who came of age during this period grew up in the suburbs, learned while watching TV, and hung out in shopping malls. They reacted against everything: their parents, their predecessors, their teachers, and their books. Art was all that was around them; why should they care if it didn’t conform to any canon? Why not invent their own?

Ed Ruscha. Parking Lots. 1967

They did. Ed Ruscha perhaps epitomized the anxiety that affected the artists of this period. Their art — some of it, at any rate — was far from a nihilistic, cynical comeback, but it was awash in irony: what were the most important architectural monuments in a city such as Los Angeles, where you were what you drove? Gas stations. What was Ruscha’s response to Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings of those years? A series of aerial views of semi-empty parking lots.

These photographers and artists opened our eyes. Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) or Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972) are inconceivable without the changes provoked by the art and, yes, photography of this period. We are now awaken to the vernacular of the American environment, its sediments of grand, trivial, and fleeting nature — something that is there one moment and gone the next. These subjects are not suited for grandiose statements.

Larry Sultan’s series Pictures from Home explore just such ephemera. They could easily pass for family snapshots taken at home during the holidays. Sultan handholds the camera, prefers ambient lighting, and avoids meticulously giving out even a whiff of a staged composition. The vertical lines converge because of the wide-angle lens, and Sultan makes no attempt to correct them. Are these the kind of views that encourage voyeurism? We could speculate about the untold stories of the parents or the silent plea in the mother’s eyes, but that wouldn’t be the point. Perhaps most disturbing of all is that this series is not all that biographical. Instead, his photographs are the mirror of our own history and anxieties. Through the intimately personal, Sultan reaches a common ground: we see ourselves in those photographs, and the view is not pretty.

Larry Sultan. My Mother Posing for Me. 1984.

At first, the open-ended arc of the View from Here disappoints. Where are we going with all of this? Are Sultan’s recent large-scale, nearly academic portraits of the rich and famous an indication of the direction for either photography in California or the museum’s own collection? Where is street photography? Where are the famous war correspondents? Is Ansel Adams still relevant? These, and many more, are all unanswered questions. We are still moving into the future. We’ll see.