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

[removed account4]

snip snip snip snip snip snip

.... if we have to invent people to support foolish off-topic arguments.

sad remarks like that even make mr t cry

 

[DREW WILEY]

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.

 

[removed account4]

thanks drew
yeah i'm not old enough to have lived through those times
but i am aware of the movement and AA's part in it
and what the seirra club stands for why they exist
but i think it is sad that people have to
wage personal attacks on people
claiming they are FOS and making stuff up
and creating "composite characters" to prove
how correct they are ... while mr t is a tough guy
who probably "pitty the fool who don't like the seirra club" ( or seirra mist )
the mean spirited remarks in thread made him cry...

 

[jtk]

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.

Yes. However (there's that word), times do change and were stuck with an ever-growing mob that has no idea about the West or, for that matter, the outdoors. And we're stuck with ever-growing mob of people who think nothing matters, "everthing's equal," literacy doesn't count and so on. It's great to be history-oriented (I am) but, especially for those marginally/narrowly educated and reliant on websites/blogs and racist cartoons, it can lead to ignoring younger people, fear of and hostility to evolving values (e.g. contributions by different ethnicities), ignorance of science (e.g. around climate and vaccinations) , lack of exposure to actual books, and proliferating cyclical phenomena such as fascism.

 

[jtk]

Maundelle Bass Weston:

Photo: Hagemeyer:

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]


Maundelle Bass Weston, from Wiki

"During the 1920s, the teenager toured Mexico, where she was spotted by the artist Diego Rivera, who was reportedly enraptured by her beauty. Rivera sought an introduction through the American Consulate, and he secured her services as a model for his portraits.[2]

Bass spent three years touring Central and South America with the Folklórico group. Her dance repertoire was influenced by dances from Africa, Egypt, Africa, Cuba, Brazil and America.[1] In Mexico City, she was a critical darling of the press after her performance at the famed Palacio de Bellas Artes. The magazine Hoy wrote, "Maudelle is the high priestess of the dances. She possesses a kind of spiritual mysticism," while Últimas Noticias wrote, "She tells the story of the dance with rapture and passion."[2]

Bass Weston moved to Los Angeles around 1933, where she continued her training at John Gray's Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles,[2] and was trained in ballet by Isobel Keith Morrison.[1] She was the first African American to study with modern choreographer Lester Horton.[4] In L.A., she established herself as a well-known studio model for art schools and for artists such as Rivera, Johan Hagemeyer, and Edward Weston.[4][5] "

 

[DREW WILEY]

One of the side effects of the Mis-information Age, or the addiction to instant-everything. Literacy keeps dropping. I worry about so many people being able to concoct their own Photoshopped stereotypes of nature that they'll forget the real thing, and our remaining wild places will get undermined from lack of appreciation. Here the parks are successfully expanding and people are willing to fund them with their own tax dollars, but that's due to a lot of study and thoughtfulness about the local demographics. I personally can't imagine how people exist in places like Dallas or Atlanta amidst endless asphalt. The long-term health effects alone make that kind of urban planning penny-wise and pound foolish. Note that I employ the term "planning" casually - most of the time it means getting their palms greased by developers.

 

[DREW WILEY]

My aunt knew Diego Rivera. She actually has more murals protected on the Natl Historic Register than him, though Diego will always be known for his comparatively festive colors and at times edgy lifestyle. I don't care much for social realism as a style, but it was pretty much mandated back then on public art projects. My aunt's personal work was a lot more interesting, but most of it is locked up in big museums and seldom seen by the public. Wonder if Diego did any camera work himself; one would think so, given he was in the same social and political circle in Mexico as EW and Tina Mondotti.

 

[jtk]

Drew, who was your aunt?

I shot many 5X7 chromes for Emmy Lou Packard, then head of San Francisco Arts Commission. a painter who had been one of Diego's nubile students and mural painting assistants and who many years later spearheaded the City's 80s explosion of murals in the Mission District. She photographed Diego et al using some sort of 120 camera but I doubt he personally bothered with photography because she never showed me examples, despite sharing hundreds of pilfered waste paper basket scraps of his work. Diego left the CP, Mondotti got deeper into it in Italy. I think Frida Kahlo had something personally to do with Trotsky's assassination (Kahlo is said have been a Stainist).

 

[DREW WILEY]

The only Rivera mural I've seen in SF itself is in the old City Club.

 

[jtk]

The only Rivera mural I've seen in SF itself is in the old City Club.

City College of San Francisco had a giant Rivera mural, outside wall of an auditorium...I think that was laboriously moved somewhere ...Packard hired me to photograph it in situ, had to use a hydrolic lift platform to center me and my 4X5 home-made with 58 Rodagon required by close quarters...65SSA would have been wide enough but that would have meant serious distortion Vs cropping the 58's image...

Don't recall if any of the downtown post office's many, many murals, or Coit Tower's were Rivera's...most were spectacular, some appealed to me more than Rivera's but none were as ambitious ... I've heard the Post Office's have been saved in course of the building's redevelopment (to condos?).

 

[Berkeley Mike]

There are murals at on at the Beach Chalet, which is just below the Dutch Windmill across the street from Ocean beach near Fulton. also at Coit Tower.

I think that they are WPA murals, not Rivera's. There are Diego Rivera murals in San Francisco: located at the Dead Link Removed, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the San Francisco City Club

 

[jtk]

AA's depiction of happy American citizen captives at Manzanar: http://bainbridgehistory.org/gallery-of-ansel-adams-photographs-of-manzanar/

 

[Arthurwg]

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]

I absolutely love California landscape painting.

 

[jtk]

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/adams-slideshow-122002 Ansel and Virginia Adams, their home in Carmel, where they settled after Weston died.

 

[Sirius Glass]

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.

 

[DREW WILEY]

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.

 

[jtk]

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.

 

[Sirius Glass]

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.

Well, at least we agree on this and Trump.

 

[MattKing]

Due to my judicious use of the ignore function, reading this thread is like watching a performance of "Waiting for Godot".

 

[jtk]

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.

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.

 

[Sirius Glass]

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.

Ansel was not happy with Manzanar and took as may photographs as he could get away with to portrait it so that people would know it was not a fun summer camp.

 

[David Brown]

Did anybody ask him how he felt about his role at Manzanar?

Yes.

Did he approve of the place?

No.

 

[jtk]

Yes.


No.

Given that many of his Manzanar photos did make Manzanar look like a summer camp, what/where/why did AA say he disapproved? This would be a good place to set that straight.

Here's a more favorable article about AA's role, and that of other famous photographers:

http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/...n-japanese-internment-camps-during-ww-ii.html

 

[jtk]

Dead Link Removed

 

[Arthurwg]

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.

As I understand it, everything there now is a reconstruction after the original camp was completely destroyed.