Didn't Ansel Adams called it the "Fuzzy wuzzies"?

Arklatexian said:

Wrong! The mark of a Pro is one who keeps his bills paid and is in business this time next year. What you described is a well-heeled "Fine Art": photographer who doesn't need to put food on his family's table with proceeds from his/her work. Anything else, not covered earlier, is a hobby! The IRS can certainly tell you the difference.....Regards!

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and even then...
if the "fine art photographer" has to please his collectors ( clients ) and gallerist ( advertising marketing pro )
he or she might not be doing anything that pleases him/herself in order to pay the bills.
maybe "well heeled" means independently wealthy ?
if that is the case... then i agree with what you have said completely!

Arklatexian said:

Wrong! The mark of a Pro is one who keeps his bills paid and is in business this time next year. What you described is a well-heeled "Fine Art": photographer who doesn't need to put food on his family's table with proceeds from his/her work. Anything else, not covered earlier, is a hobby! The IRS can certainly tell you the difference.....Regards!

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That "family's table" idea, like the "bills paid" idea is cute but doesn't relate to the experience of many artists (not to mention plumbers or MDs etc), and certainly most commercial photographers think of themselves as artists.. The IRS does what the IRS does, is just as relevant to hobby types (like me now) as it is to pros, plumbers, and to Wally World managers.

fwiw I knew many successful professional photographers in San Francisco over an approx ten years stretch. Some were regular competition with art directors and designers.

A number were, like me, directly or indirectly influenced by Minor White (RIT launched many pros, both on "art" and "other" side). Some came from journalism, others had been assistants. Most pros are artists, IMO.

Many photographers have always purportedly "tried" then failed, and like other lines of work, that's on them. S*** doesn't "happen," it's earned.

It's no harder to make a living in photography, assuming basic skillsets and enough personal character to call directly on lots of prospective clients and then deliver for them, than to make a living as a Toyota mechanic. The many failures in photography, hobbiest included, are like bad photographs, the fault of the photographer.

Alan Johnson said:

I wonder if the influence of AA as in the link post 1 is just a modern myth. Searching "Camera Craft" 1938 for pictorial there is no mention of AA.
https://archive.org/stream/cameracraft451938phot#page/70/mode/2up/search/pictorial

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Thank you for this link to Camera Craft. I look forward to sending more time with it. I read the Wikipedia page on F.64 and it quotes AA from CC in 1934:

"In 1933 Adams wrote the following for Camera Craft magazine:
"My conception of Group f/64 is this: it is an organization of serious photographers without formal ritual of procedure, incorporation, or any of the restrictions of artistic secret societies, Salons, clubs or cliques…The Group was formed as an expression of our desire to define the trend of photography as we conceive it…Our motive is not to impose a school with rigid limitations, or to present our work with belligerent scorn of other view-points, but to indicate what we consider to be reasonable statements of straight photography. Our individual tendencies are encouraged; the Group Exhibits suggest distinctive individual view-points, technical and emotional, achieved without departure from the simplest aspects of straight photographic procedure."[6]"
This separation, this disentanglement, to independence from 100 years of defining photography through an aesthetic (or narrative) defined by painting, must have been awkward at best. I'm sure that the traditionalists insisted upon laying claim to this F.64 proposition as photography all the same but failing by their standards. At the same tie I imaging the F.64 folk just couldn't wait for these traditionalists to pass on and free photography to be what it could be in its own terms.

I disagree that this issue was simply a matter of us vs. them; that in itself, continues to define F.64 in traditional terms seen as the absolute index of imaging. F.64, in some sense, was a restart of the medium, now technically refined and understood as a method of capture, allowed to define itself within a new vision expressed purely through the limitations and capabilities of photographic craft.

I might suggest, somewhat off-topic, that analogue folk and digital folk are doing the same dance. The A people will demand the the D people use their aesthetic even denigrating D expressions. The D folk might argue about whether the A folk are even relevant and awaiting their effect to recede. Awkward at best...but I digress.

jtk said:

It's no harder to make a living in photography, assuming basic skillsets and enough personal character to call directly on lots of prospective clients and then deliver for them, than to make a living as a Toyota mechanic.

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Harder, no; perhaps much more awkward and subject to serendipity.This is an extremely specific qualification; hardly Everyman. I don't know of any photographer or artist who said, "I want make photographs so I can get into the juicy parts of business management, the politics of job acquisition, managing Federal/State/Local regulation, and lose time with my family..."

Anecdote: Dad was a mechanic of 47 years and I watched him drag his a** to work well or ill. He often wondered at how i was able to do this (Freelance Photography) thing.

Art is a subset of all photography. Photographic Art is a subset of photos successfully selling in galleries. Photos that sell are a subset of what pleases the photographer. There is art and the other stuff can be referred to as "potboilers."

Mirriam-Webster:
potboiler
: a usually inferior work (as of art or literature) produced chiefly for profit.

Gosh jtk - you keep arguing about things regardless of any personal knowledge or not. I have that encyclopedia volume! And it was Weston's pictorial work that made him famous in the first place. It's in museums and collections. Why would he destroy that? It's what funded his ability to get out of the studio once in awhile. Where on earth have you been? No, this might not have been "fuzzy-wuzzy" in the sense of soft focus lenses, but it sure at heck wasn't "f64" in the sense of his later work. He did set aside in boxes quite a few of his work prints which did not meet his personal standard of printing. I don't know if he destroyed prints or not. But someone did inherit a lot of the non-keepers and set up a gallery attempting to sell them, just a block away from my own office. After two prints sold at a reasonably
high price, it was a flop; serious collectors don't want either the rejects or the commercial work. And "token" buyers of secondary works simply don't pay enough to keep the doors open in high-rent districts.

Berkeley Mike said:

Art is a subset of all photography. Photographic Art is a subset of photos successfully selling in galleries. Photos that sell are a subset of what pleases the photographer. There is art and the other stuff can be referred to as "potboilers."

Mirriam-Webster:
potboiler
: a usually inferior work (as of art or literature) produced chiefly for profit.

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Sounds like you're saying hobbiests make "potboilers." I'm probably misunderstanding. Not sure I agree with the importance of galleries to the definition of "Photographic Art."
I don't think Avedon's work or Penn's work was "successfully sold" in galleries before it was recognized as "art."
IMO "art" as a word has become (especially among photographers) almost meaningless.

jtk said:

Sounds like you're saying hobbiests make "potboilers." I'm probably misunderstanding. Not sure I agree with the importance of galleries to the definition of "Photographic Art."
I don't think Avedon's work or Penn's work was "successfully sold" in galleries before it was recognized as "art."
IMO "art" as a word has become (especially among photographers) almost meaningless.

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I can see that interpretation but I am thinking in terms of Gallery/Art. Simplistic to be sure but statistically dominant. Commerce gets mixed into this, too, but to what degree?

I cannot answer to how hobbyists or students fit into this. Art needs broadcast or it may as well not exist and shooters are just playing with themselves. How else might we qualify Art presence in our community? What is the vehicle? Galleries, shows, contests. The defining the occurrence of "art" in our contemporary media is a statistical definition. What/where else?

As to that, I do not know if the term "art" is meaningless but instead eludes definition, a very different thing.

Different strategies. Some practitioners are good at dividing their personal work from their commercial: In personal image-making, you are in charge of the intended outcome, in commercial, the client is, although they might have chosen you for the merits of your personal vision. A handful of photographers have eventually advanced their reputation to the point they can do their own work, regardless. But in my opinion, the majority of art career types, esp in photography, are simply pandering to a new type of commercial client and it own stereotypes of what fine art is supposed to look like, whether this be critics or museum venues, at the expense of personal freedom. So there are plenty of others who prefer to make a living another way entirely, and do what they please when it comes to image-making.

DREW WILEY said:

Gosh jtk - you keep arguing about things regardless of any personal knowledge or not. I have that encyclopedia volume! And it was Weston's pictorial work that made him famous in the first place. It's in museums and collections. Why would he destroy that? It's what funded his ability to get out of the studio once in awhile. Where on earth have you been? No, this might not have been "fuzzy-wuzzy" in the sense of soft focus lenses, but it sure at heck wasn't "f64" in the sense of his later work. He did set aside in boxes quite a few of his work prints which did not meet his personal standard of printing. I don't know if he destroyed prints or not. But someone did inherit a lot of the non-keepers and set up a gallery attempting to sell them, just a block away from my own office. After two prints sold at a reasonably
high price, it was a flop; serious collectors don't want either the rejects or the commercial work. And "token" buyers of secondary works simply don't pay enough to keep the doors open in high-rent districts.

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What's the point? Even if you actually do have that "encyclopedia volume" it wouldn't be relevant to the OT and it wouldn't help your criticism of Weston..

But I do appreciate your back-pedaling . Takes a real man to admit his errors.

Its irrelevant what one imagines made Weston's work "famous in the first place." What "first place?"

My understanding (from Daybook II) is that Edward Weston's only fame-related rivalry was with Stieglitz.

Weston bailed out of soft focus by moving. So did Imogene Cunningham (f64). It was probably hard to make that move. Why don't you like those decisions?

As to destruction of one's work, photographers and other artists often destroy work with which they no longer wish to be identified. This usually seems to have to do with a) artistic change and/or b) personal integrity.

HCB abandoned photography to paint. Late in his career, Robert Frank spend more time with audio recording than photography.

Authors commonly change their public names in order to distance themselves from their previous public names, and often never use their real names. Readers know this.

Change is more fun, more productive, than the alternative.

This repetitive half-informed drivel is getting me quite tempted to seek the Ignore setting. Why do you insist on speaking of Pictorialism as if it were synonymous
with soft-focus lenses? There was nothing fuzzy-wuzzy about the images of the godfather of all of it, Emerson.

The development of photography outside North America appears to have been hardly influenced at all by AA, much more by the introduction of the minature camera:
https://nga.gov.au/Photography/0706.12.Occassional paper.pdf

Alan Johnson said:

The development of photography outside North America appears to have been hardly influenced at all by AA, much more by the introduction of the minature camera:
https://nga.gov.au/Photography/0706.12.Occassional paper.pdf

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Makes sense that Aussie's would look to Europe. East Coast US did the same thing. Part of the F.64 movement was to distance itself from that perspective.

Alan Johnson said:

The development of photography outside North America appears to have been hardly influenced at all by AA, much more by the introduction of the minature camera:
https://nga.gov.au/Photography/0706.12.Occassional paper.pdf

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AA's influence was mostly with people who learned about him from American photo magazines (IMO). Few Americans have seen many of his original prints, hardly any have seen his earlier washed-out looking prints...which look far better in reproduction and when printed by Ansel's modern standards.

Europe and UK are another kettle of fish. Stieglitz, as an American, had far more impact in Europe and UK than Adams or Weston, and was far more influenced by Europeans and UKers. Interestingly Stieglitz's New York exhibitions did more (from what I've read) for Picasso's fame than did any European or UK gallery attention.

DREW WILEY said:

This repetitive half-informed drivel is getting me quite tempted to seek the Ignore setting. Why do you insist on speaking of Pictorialism as if it were synonymous
with soft-focus lenses? There was nothing fuzzy-wuzzy about the images of the godfather of all of it, Emerson.

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Review your own previous post. You're the guy that played with fuzzy/soft focus...back when you were backtracking.

AA particularly appeals to the American psyche due to his close relation to the Natl Parks movement. Their heydays overlapped, and the sight of allegedly unspoiled North American nature was welcome relief from the turmoils of war abroad. It was also the golden age of automobile tourism. AA was deeply involved not only in the organizational strength of the environmental movement, but in how it dovetailed photog into formal art recognition. Then there was his teaching role afterwards, evidenced by thousands of clones and wannabees. He deserves to be a national icon. But he also had an acute poetic sensibility which few of his disciples inherited. We locals resented the Sierra Club for their huge horse convoys tearing up the trails and meadows and leaving bits of trash everywhere they went. And I certainly can't envision myself attending some big bonfire skit instead of witnessing the last light of alpenglow in solitude. And although that herd mentality is now obsolete, certain of those places wouldn't even be Federally protected without some form of public awareness, of which AA was highly instrumental. He certainly wasn't the first. Watkins and Muybridge were among the real pioneers, and in some ways even more brilliant in terms of compositional skill and sheer determination, and certainly more interesting in terms of biographical drama (like Muybridge murdering his wife, and Watkins going insane). But for we baby-boomers, AA was the conspicuous prototype of the illusive outdoor career, even though he probably spent more of his own time in the daily grind of commercial work.

DREW WILEY said:

AA particularly appeals to the American psyche due to his close relation to the Natl Parks movement.

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and because the appeal of calendars and posters..
that is what made him famous ...

DREW WILEY said:

AA particularly appeals to the American psyche due to his close relation to the Natl Parks movement. Their heydays overlapped, and the sight of allegedly unspoiled North American nature was welcome relief from the turmoils of war abroad. It was also the golden age of automobile tourism. AA was deeply involved not only in the organizational strength of the environmental movement, but in how it dovetailed photog into formal art recognition. Then there was his teaching role afterwards, evidenced by thousands of clones and wannabees. He deserves to be a national icon. But he also had an acute poetic sensibility which few of his disciples inherited. We locals resented the Sierra Club for their huge horse convoys tearing up the trails and meadows and leaving bits of trash everywhere they went. And I certainly can't envision myself attending some big bonfire skit instead of witnessing the last light of alpenglow in solitude. And although that herd mentality is now obsolete, certain of those places wouldn't even be Federally protected without some form of public awareness, of which AA was highly instrumental. He certainly wasn't the first. Watkins and Muybridge were among the real pioneers, and in some ways even more brilliant in terms of compositional skill and sheer determination, and certainly more interesting in terms of biographical drama (like Muybridge murdering his wife, and Watkins going insane). But for we baby-boomers, AA was the conspicuous prototype of the illusive outdoor career, even though he probably spent more of his own time in the daily grind of commercial work.

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I'm a longtime Sierra Club supporter, but in many respects it'd be easy to agree with Drew. When America's current administration, which very much agrees, attacking America's wilderness legacy again (as with Bears Ears) we will wish we had more people like AA.

By contrast, although he produced gorgeous scenic prints (e.g. Mexico and Carmel), EW was more concerned with bohemian culture (e.g. Jeffers, dance), women/men/family, pure forms (e.g. peppers. bedpan), eros generally... and the struggle to survive without commercial assignments...he was much more attuned to the big politics of his day (Mexican and American) than AA seemed to be.

AA's highly profitable work for Polaroid Corp actually did stimulate me: my only good self-portrait (Agfa Ansco 8X10/12" Commercial Ektar/Polaroid 52) and one of my father's almost inevitable Polaroid multiple exposures are personal treasures. A few may remember Polaroid's biggest client was South Africa: i.d. photos of folks with dark skins. Ansel probably knew about that, but Weston didn't.

Mainecoonmaniac said:

Enjoy!
http://petapixel.com/2016/09/22/ansel-adams-wrote-pictorialism-photography-history/

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From the above link, ANDY ROMANOFF wrote:

"We all have a blind spot, both literally and metaphorically. Ansel Adams had one so big and powerful that he, Beaumont Newhall, and a few others “disappeared” some very important and wonderful photographers from the history of photography. And in doing so they also helped “disappear” an important movement in photography, one called Pictorialism."

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Well, in fact AA has presented one photo of pictorial style in his book, "Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs".
The photo was representing an early stage of his photographic life.
After gaining more skills in photographic craft, and realized that photography is an art in its own separated from other forms of arts, he worked against collage work and any "un pure" forms of arts that may be identified as photography, after it failed to convince other pure forms of arts. Pictorialism is great art, any art, but not photography. This is the message of AA, and could not blame him for that.
Unfortunately, the writer of the article did not do justice with the subject.
I think, all this propaganda has started only after Photoshop became the template of most photos generated.
Whether we need now another AA to separate computer generated designs from actual photography, or not?, the real photographic craft and methods are continuing to spread from generation to generation seamlessly so far.

As some of you already know, my doctoral dissertation was on soft-focus lenses, one aspect of Pictorialism. I spent six years mining archives for books, magazines, images, letters, ehemera, etc., reading more than 500,000 pages related to soft focus lenses in particular and Pictorialism more generally. In reading through the preceding discussion, there are a lot of loose ends left. Perhaps most importantly, the conflating of "fuzzy-wuzzy" (as bandied about by Adams and Weston et al) with Pictorialism stands out. Pictorialism was a broad church, the first 'art movement' in the history of photography, and as several of you point out, it continues well into the digital age. Moreover it began at different times in different geographic locals and played out differently as well. In all the prior verbage in this thread, no one has bothered to define what is being argued about: Pictorialism.

A systematic examination of WHO wrote/published photographic history in the United States might be revealing. Newhall is noted above but there were other key authors such as Helmut Gernsheim who wrote far more books (and of better quality) than Newhall. Gernsheim studied in the 1930s at the Bavarian School of Photography; the year he began there, a new director was hired who was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus movement, which shaped Gernsheim's views about contrast, sharpness, tonality, etc. Once he came to America, he linked up with Newhall (they first met in London, 1945) who encouraged those modernist views further. Between them, and their students, they rigidly controlled the doctrine of American photographic history until the 1990s. Here are three examples of how that occurred (1) when I proposed a book on pictorialism about 1980, the three publishers I queried all replied that "the history of photography had already been written" by Newhall and Gernsheim and thus no further book could be sold; (2) when it came to more modest articles in peer-reviewed journals, virtually everyone in those positions were students of Newhall/Gernsheim and detested the very thought of Pictorialism; (3) this same system prevented any major museum from showing Pictorail photography. Christian Petersen at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts was one of the first to break that strangle hold and he was extremely brave to make that step.

Lastly, the explanations for the demise of Pictorialism noted in this thread are unduly simplistic. Chapter 7 of my disseration, pages 251-319, is not comprehensive enough to thoroughly dissect all the root causes just in America & Britain, and again, they are wildly different in different countries. Its far too complex for me to write about here but "changing attitudes" is only a small contributor.

My apologies for typos and poor structure but I'm packing to leave for a fortnight long journey in 24 hours and my mind is rather distracted at this moment.

Russ
https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/505 dissertation link

Just two summers ago I stood at the exact spot on the Lyell Fork where AA took that famous soft-focus shot, plus several others similar to it. But he also took a standard lens and made some shots with that. But it was when he returned there twenty years later that he made his dramatic thunderstorm shot across the meadow toward the peak now named for him, as well as two well known streamside shots. I had very different weather more appropriate for a high-key delicate rendering of the same subject matter, plus some interesting color opportunities due to a slight smoke haze from a forest fire way down-canyon.
But it's still a spectacular spot with few visitors. Nobody else was around; in fact, me and my backpacking companion didn't see anyone else for an entire week, when we were finally heading over the main pass into that country. From the rim above the Lyell Fork, one can barely pick out the back of Half Dome in the far distance, where the mobs congeal in summer heat. Two different Yosemites. I'm all for wilderness protection. One of my favorite National Parks is Kings Canyon, which is 95%
wilderness, and a big chunk of it completely untrailed. But there are times when officially classifying a place as something
special inevitably attracts so many nature lovers that they cause way more damage than if it had just been kept quiet. Look at what happened to the whole area around Moab, or to Capitol Reef once motel chains noted that an official Scenic Highway
was due to bottom out there. The lovely little town of Torrey became a ghost town of one huge empty hotel and motel after
another. The greedy developers were too stupid to research that the road involves a high pass, and is closed due to snow much of the year.

its a shame everything ends up being so tribal..

I read that the Adams / Mortensen debate started in 1934 Camera Craft which ca be accessed from this link:
https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/free-pdf-manuals-books-and-repair-info.113038/
p106 for Mortensen's critque of the f 64 group.

DREW WILEY said:

Just two summers ago I stood at the exact spot on the Lyell Fork where AA took that famous soft-focus shot, plus several others similar to it. But he also took a standard lens and made some shots with that. But it was when he returned there twenty years later that he made his dramatic thunderstorm shot across the meadow toward the peak now named for him, as well as two well known streamside shots. I had very different weather more appropriate for a high-key delicate rendering of the same subject matter, plus some interesting color opportunities due to a slight smoke haze from a forest fire way down-canyon.
But it's still a spectacular spot with few visitors. Nobody else was around; in fact, me and my backpacking companion didn't see anyone else for an entire week, when we were finally heading over the main pass into that country. From the rim above the Lyell Fork, one can barely pick out the back of Half Dome in the far distance, where the mobs congeal in summer heat. Two different Yosemites. I'm all for wilderness protection. One of my favorite National Parks is Kings Canyon, which is 95%
wilderness, and a big chunk of it completely untrailed. But there are times when officially classifying a place as something
special inevitably attracts so many nature lovers that they cause way more damage than if it had just been kept quiet. Look at what happened to the whole area around Moab, or to Capitol Reef once motel chains noted that an official Scenic Highway
was due to bottom out there. The lovely little town of Torrey became a ghost town of one huge empty hotel and motel after
another. The greedy developers were too stupid to research that the road involves a high pass, and is closed due to snow much of the year.

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Drew, I agree completely with your observations about damage wrought by backpackers and other outdoor enthusiasts, but...but I think it's crucial for even more people to get outdoors as often as possible. Nothing is free and that includes what some call "wilderness." If you advocate mandatory population control, that raises interesting questions. I guess we are attempting that by default in places like Syria.

jtk said:

Drew, I agree completely with your observations about damage wrought by backpackers and other outdoor enthusiasts, but...but I think it's crucial for even more people to get outdoors as often as possible. Nothing is free and that includes what some call "wilderness." If you advocate mandatory population control, that raises interesting questions. I guess we are attempting that by default in places like Syria.

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I agree. There is nothing worse than a Sierra Club snob who thinks that only those who visit places do it in only their own personal manner and the rest should be banned. I do strongly subscribe to: