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Ansel Adams: "Rose and Driftwood, 1932"

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It's an efficient image of a rose like all of Ansel's portraits were efficient. Now go look at Imogen's magnolia blossom and tell me why it fills me with a whole different experience. Could just be me, I suppose.
 
jimgalli said:
It's an efficient image of a rose like all of Ansel's portraits were efficient. Now go look at Imogen's magnolia blossom and tell me why it fills me with a whole different experience. Could just be me, I suppose.
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Hmmm —- Ansel’s flower is all about contrast and sharpness, while Imogen’s is about light and and being weightless. I’d rather have hers on my wall. I wonder how the market values these in terms of price? Not that market price is necessarily a true indicator of artistic value.
 
RalphLambrecht said:
who wants relity in a photograph? If you want reality, go look out of a window or take a bus.
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Sort of my point . . . if I had one. Not Saint Ansel's best imesho. Although I've always liked the thistle and fence boards one done about the same time.
 
I believe that was Jim's point...:cool:, but most snapshots would belong to the remembered-reality type (wanting reality in a photograph). I think people's memory of experiences are being influenced by the possibilities and look of today's digital work...turn up the saturation and the sharpness, and that was the way we remembered it.

AA was not a weightless sort of guy most of the time, especially as he matured. There are weightless images of light, but that's it not what people seem to remember him by. As to his 'efficiency', an interesting way to put it. He was a bit more than efficient, but Imogen was eloquent.
 
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Well he has stayed consistent (at least on the issue of arrangement). I Camera and Lens, The Creative Approach (Morgan & Morgan, 1970 1st revised edition, June 1974 4th printing), In Illustration 73 (pg. 146), "Leaves, Stump, Frost, Yosemite Valley, California" he says "This is a 'found' subject; the leaves were not arranged. Arrangement is perfectly valid if the situations justify it. But the most convincing photography lies in the awareness of shape and potentials of in the world around us."

https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/63.19.103p/
 
jimgalli said:
It's an efficient image of a rose like all of Ansel's portraits were efficient. Now go look at Imogen's magnolia blossom and tell me why it fills me with a whole different experience. Could just be me, I suppose.
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No Jim, not just you. "Efficient" is a good choice of words; good sharpness and contrast. In fact, probably close to what my result would have been. However compared to Imogen's, she captured and conveyed the softness of the subject. Always one of my favorites.

Nice to run into you here, Jim. I must have been looking in the wrong places. Hope all goes well with you.

Merg
 
My wife asked me plant a Magnolia tree but Roses are faster is my argument!!!

Right now, none of us are winning since we don't have enough space in the garden.
 
RalphLambrecht said:
who wants relity in a photograph? If you want reality, go look out of a window or take a bus.
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While you think Adams photographs look close to reality than others but if you have his print and can see his subjects in real life I bet the differences are very great. So Adams photographs look real but they are far from real.
 
Ansel should've stuck to landscapes. This is a technically excellent but contrived image.
 
Landscapes aren't contrived?
 
Mike Lopez said:
His were.
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Contrived:
1) deliberately created rather than arising naturally or spontaneously.
2) created or arranged in a way that seems artificial and unrealistic.

AA is guilty of #1 for sure...he was a creator, using the tools of his art form.
Hmmm...#2...people always seem to say the AA was too realistic.

His prints were the real thing, tho of course material and equipment have greatly improved, and there have been, are, and will be better technical printers. So perhaps AA is only semi-contrived, like most artists using their hands. Perhaps that is why the Greeks favored the handless-arts of poetry, song, plays, and so forth.
 
Wayne said:
Generally not in the same sense or degree that this one was.
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The poor guy can never win...:cool:...Damned for making only grand landscape images, and damned for making a simple still life of the contrast of light and textures!
It is a lovely image.
 
Vaughn said:
Contrived:
1) deliberately created rather than arising naturally or spontaneously.
2) created or arranged in a way that seems artificial and unrealistic.

AA is guilty of #1 for sure...he was a creator, using the tools of his art form.
Hmmm...#2...people always seem to say the AA was too realistic.

His prints were the real thing, tho of course material and equipment have greatly improved, and there have been, are, and will be better technical printers. So perhaps AA is only semi-contrived, like most artists using their hands. Perhaps that is why the Greeks favored the handless-arts of poetry, song, plays, and so forth.
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I think of his landscape work as contrived in the sense that a great deal of his classics were planned. Moonrise, Hernandez, is an obvious exception, and the story behind that image is well-known. But how many of his works were repeated ad nauseum over the years to the point of being formulaic? Years ago I came across a guide to Yosemite that he wrote...it told you where to go to replicate some of his most famous images, what time of year and time of day to be there, which filters to take with you, and which lenses he recommended. In other words, the resulting photographs were not at all spontaneous--they were planned in meticulous detail and repeated over the years. No discovery, very little that was new...just photographs that sold very well.

His darkroom wizardry notwithstanding, I also find much of his work to be unrealistic and even "artificial." How many of his images rely on red filters to make the sky nearly black? Those sky tones don't occur on their own. I know, he did it to separate clouds from sky. But this is, in my opinion, quite a deviation from "realistic."
 
Planning and contrivance are different.

Both of the photos under discussion are somewhat artificial in the sense of not accurately representing the real scene. They're both in black and white, for starters.
 
Vaughn said:
The poor guy can never win...:cool:...Damned for making only grand landscape images, and damned for making a simple still life of the contrast of light and textures!
It is a lovely image.
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Well Vaughn, I think he did win. He helped pave the way to those who today consider photography as a fine art. We who feel that to be true, owe much to Ansel. At least I do. I liked him as a person, and for the lesson of what could be seen by looking, and then captured with a camera. He was not alone, of course, Edward Weston taught the same lesson, as did a few others.

As to Rose and Driftwood, I first saw this photograph when I was ten years old, seventy years ago. It was tipped into Ansel's first book, Making a Photograph. It possibly gave me the idea of doing close-ups when I got a camera a few years later. His landscapes never resonated the same way, but gave me the idea to try them. Anyway, Ansel will always be a topic for conversation on many levels.
 
Vaughn said:
The poor guy can never win...:cool:...Damned for making only grand landscape images, and damned for making a simple still life of the contrast of light and textures!
It is a lovely image.
Click to expand...

I didn't damn him for making landscape images, grand or not, because that's what he was very good at. He wasn't nearly as good at portraiture or at least in this specific case, still life.
 
Mike Lopez said:
His were.
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Oh, I see what mean. Ansel accelerated the universe to close to the speed of light so that he could warp the scene and the decelerated the universe. I got. Let me get my tin foil hat.
tin hat.PNG
 
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