- Joined
- Jun 21, 2003
- Messages
- 29,832
- Format
- Hybrid
snip snip snip snip snip snip
sad remarks like that even make mr t cry
sad remarks like that even make mr t cry
Last edited:
.... if we have to invent people to support foolish off-topic arguments.
AA and the SC are almost synonymous, at least in terms of historic significance. He was both a key advocate and organizer of those big backcountry convoys, whether for better or worse; and it is in relation to such work that many of his most iconic pictures were taken, and how much of his photographic philosophy and technique was moulded. Some people like traveling as herds, some don't. I'm in the latter category. I don't even like running into them, which I sometimes did, trailside mini-marts n all. It's a past era in terms of allowable usage, at least in the Sierra Nevada itself, but one can't anymore excise it from photographic history than one can deny how Park rangers once deliberately fed bears garbage in front of tourists on grandstands - which I personally witnessed as a kid. It was all part of the ethos of the whole National Parks movement and what for many is a nostalgic token of "better times" lending AA's images much of their great popularity in this country. Pictorialism looked at the landscape in another manner, much more analogous to 19th C Impressionism. Crisp hard camera landscape images certainly didn't originate with the f/64 movement, or even with Paul Strand, but with frontier and Civil War photographers long before. Even a modernist / constructivist way of looking at Yosemite began with Carleton Watkins, well before Sheeler did it with industrial subjects, or before Steigliz or anyone else ever displayed a cubist painting, or even before Cezanne visualized things analogously. Different media, for sure, but the mentality was there, even though an abundance of more mundane images also had to be taken to satisfy the tourism campaign of his railroad sponsors. All of this factors in, plus a whole lot more if you grew up right in the middle of it, like I did. The Ken Burns PBS series on the Natl Parks does a wonderful job describing the evolution of all this.
The only Rivera mural I've seen in SF itself is in the old City Club.
In 1922 Hagemeyer built a spring-summer studio in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, at that time the largest art colony on the Pacific coast, and donated his photographs that December to a local fund-raising exhibit.[2] It was here that Hagemeyer met Edward Weston, who encouraged him to further his career in photography. He moved his Carmel address in 1924 to a new "artfully designed studio" at the prominent junction of Mountain View and Ocean Avenues, which became a meeting place for intellectuals as well as a "gallery" to display the works of local and visiting artists.[3][4][5] In 1928 he relocated to a significantly larger "Johan Hagemeyer Studio-Gallery," where he devoted an entire room to his own pictorial art and held major exhibitions of prominent Post-Impressionists painters, such as Henrietta Shore, as well as art photographers, including Edward Weston.[3][6] In February 1932 at the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California Hagemeyer displayed his photographs in a joint exhibition with Carmel's most famous Impressionist painter, William Frederic Ritschel.[7] Through the spring and summer of 1938 he exhibited his landscape and portrait photos at the Guild of Carmel Craftsmen.[8][9]
AA's depiction of happy American citizen captives at Manzanar: http://bainbridgehistory.org/gallery-of-ansel-adams-photographs-of-manzanar/
To me the people uprooted by Executive Order 9066 do not look happy. They look like they are just dealing with it.
Me too. I meant to suggest "bitter" when I said "happy.' I've known a few of those people. They were "solid citizens" before we stole their lives from them and they became solid citizens again...except when they became angry activists.
One of the solid citizens, a Republican Party official in Salinas, told me how his son tried to enlist for VN and had to endure a test of his American cultural credentials...he'd been born in CA, graduated high school in CA, and wanted to be an American soldier. One of the acculturalation questions was "how do you pour a beer in order to avoid too much foam?" Even that Reagan supporter recognized how stupid that question was, as if Japanese people didn't know how to drink beer.
As a kid my mother would drive me down the hill and we'd help a Japanese family who returned from Manzanar pick their peach crop. They were starting all over,
having lost their former orchard due to internment. I'm convinced that whole thing was just an opportunistic scheme by the fruit distributors to acquire productive ranches cheaply. Same scenario in the Hood River Valley in Oregon. They did slowly succeed a second time; but the whole painful lesson predictably led to lawyers among the next generation of those families. Not only AA took pictures in Manzanar. One of the internees had a homemade box camera and managed to get film and darkroom supplies smuggled in. The chief military officer in charge of the camp secretly gave him his blessing, and simply asked him to inform him whenever pictures were being taken, so he could deliberately turn his back. Officially, it was against the rules. But as usual, AA got his mountains all mixed up. His famous picture of "Mt.Williamson from Manzanar" was actually just a pointy rise on an unnamed 12,000 foot peak. The actual Williamson is a huge thing conspicuously over 2,000 ft higher, seven miles to the north, and fully visible from Manzanar.
I'm probably making too much of what I see in this photo. AA's cowboy hat and bolo tie contrast interestingly with his very expensive Gucci "snaffel bit" shoes.
Did anybody ask him how he felt about his role at Manzanar? Did he approve of the place? I suspect Weston wouldn't have.
Yes.Did anybody ask him how he felt about his role at Manzanar?
No.Did he approve of the place?
Yes.
No.
Very good observations. I wandered Manzanar recently, made a few photos. The mountains are of course beautiful. Some in our military tried hard to make it seem less like a concentration camp ...but it's likely that your analysis is closer to the truth.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?