Edward Weston - Daybooks

dnmilikan said:

As I read the posts to this thread I am a little confused because in one breath KenM asks for an explanation and then when one is tendered he calls it a "load of crap". I wonder if what he really wants is an explanation or perhaps more likely an argument. There are far better and more intelligent ways to express an opinion then to call someone else's opinion a "load of crap". That takes this matter to a level of a personal attack.

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I call it a load of crap because it is. To say that someone cannot 'see' simply because they crop in the darkroom as opposed to the camera is just plain ridiculous. To say 'thow out a negative because you need to crop in the darkroom' is also ridiculous.

Michael's explanation was just that - it was a statement that discards a large number of photographers as 'inept' when that's just not the case. I take that statement to task, since I simply believe that what he said was just wrong.

And I'm sorry you think it's a personal attack. I called someone's *opinion* a load of crap - perhaps the phrasing was a bit harsh for you, but I don't believe in sugar-coating what I need to say. It was *my* opinion.

In this case, I guess we have to agree to disagree. We are allowed to disagree in this part of the world. Yes?

Anyways, I have started a thread elsewhere about cropping. The tone of the conversation there seems to be, shall I say, a bit tamer?

:-D

Not to throw fuel on the fire, but I have to agree with KenM. That statement was a load of crap. You can't make statements like that and not expect to get a reaction out of people. I suspect that was your intent all along.

Michael,

To say that "Cropping is an admission of failure to see creatively" is to isolate the creative moment and both anchor and limit it to the instant of exposure. That restriction would make photography unique amongst the arts as the only one that denies the artist the freedom of revision. For isn't cropping just that -- a tool for revision that lets the photographer fine-tune, re-think, or just plain change his/her mind? Writers are free to rewrite, and painters to sketch and re-sketch, and while it's extraordinary that Mozart could "compose" on the ground glass, why does that take away from Beethoven who played with the framing "L's" for weeks afterwards?

Sorry, I don't get it. Michael, my question is a serious one: why must photography be unique amongst the arts and artificially restrictive to the artist in the way you propose?

Although way overstated, there is a point to the not crop opinion. Force yourself to see to the edge of the image , not just the central subject of the image. It would certainly be a good exercise in visualization. The goal is to produce a negative that doesn't require a herculean darkroom effort in order to produce a fine art print.

I think that there is a lot to what Michael says. I also agree that there is a lot to say for what those who disagree have said. I recognize a couple of factors that may come into to play here.

The first on the side of not cropping (those who shoot 8X10 and larger). Most of us contact print those negatives. To have a negative and then begin chopping off a little here and there will diminish the size of the print to the point where it doesn't carry the impact that it might. In this way 8X10 and larger formats brings one to developing more discipline. Is this a bad thing? No, I think not.

Now on the side of 4X5 and 5X7 photographers...most of those negatives are enlarged. I recognize that I can crop a section out of a 4X5 negative and probably still come up with a print that is pleasing up to a reasonable size. Since I rarely enlarge 4X5 beyond a 11X14 print...it is no big deal. Is that a bad thing? No, I think not. So long as I am pleased with the result, the rest of the world and it's opinions really don't matter much.

In the defense of Michaels position, I recognize that Michael Smith has been photographing longer then some of the participants of this forum have lived. Certainly longer then the vast majority have photographed. That is a long time of doing things in a way that has produced prodigious results.

In defense of the "cropping crowd" I recognize that if you haven't photographed with the larger cameras and contact printed then you don't have the same experience to draw from.

Why does either position need to be defended to the point of destroying friendships? Makes no sense to me.

As someone once told me "opinions are like a**holes everyone has one".

Poco said:

To say that "Cropping is an admission of failure to see creatively" is to isolate the creative moment and both anchor and limit it to the instant of exposure. That restriction would make photography unique amongst the arts as the only one that denies the artist the freedom of revision. For isn't cropping just that -- a tool for revision that lets the photographer fine-tune, re-think, or just plain change his/her mind?

Sorry, I don't get it. Michael, my question is a serious one: why must photography be unique amongst the arts and artificially restrictive to the artist in the way you propose?

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Poco,

I'm not Michael, but I do agree with what he is saying. And yes, for me it is an "admission of guilt." When I was printing in Platinum, cropping during printing was also not an option. I didn't and won't make enlarged negatives or digitally output negatives for contact printing. This was because of my personal beliefs that they are inferior to in-camera negatives. Again, "MY" belief even though I know others feel different.

Does this limit what I can do to edit an image, yes.
Has this forced me to SEE better, YES.

Limiting the options to save an image is not always a bad thing, if it also makes you grow as an artist. I'm not speaking from the view point of a commercial shooter. When I did that work, I cropped the hell out of anything to get the job out the door. I am speaking from the view point of making "MY" art. Notice the "MY" there, this is not meant to be a rule for anybody else to follow or be judged by, it is what I hold "MY" work to and how I push my work and myself to get better.

Also let's remember we are on the APUG site here. It's not that hard to make the same argument for editing an image digitally. How many times do you here from the digital folks "oh I'll just edit it out in photoshop." If you do it right at the moment when you are experiencing the scene in front of you, your image might be closer to the feeling that scene gave you. For some people this is not as important.

Also I believe Don hit on a good point. There seems to be a difference in the way you look at this topic (to crop or not) based on the format and type of work you are doing. I do landscape and figure work, and I shoot LF negatives. I can see the whole image on the ground glass clear as day. There is no reason for me not to see something that needs to be fixed before the moment of exposure. If I were doing photojournalism, candid portraits in a fluid environment or something else, I would not be as hard on myself.

Thanks, George.

No doubt those shooting (U)LF and contact printing approach the question from a different angle. I think, though, there's a danger in elevating a limitation of one's individually chosen medium into a virtue that all others must accept.

That said, you've very clearly stated what's right for YOU and why, and that's appreciated.

If I was using Large Format - and contact printing, I would be *very* sensitive to the frame. With 120 and the little 35mm I do now and my enlarger ... how does the song go ...

"It's my party and I'll crop if I want to...
Crop if I want to ...
You'd crop too - If it happened to you."

I had even forgotten I had written this. Yes, I'm causing trouble again.

The Weston book will be available from us directly at a pre-pub price of $95 until April 30. After that it is $125 plus $10 shipping. (It is a big 252 page book). It will NOT be on Amazon or on any other of the discount places.

Cropping: Jeez, you guys miss the point entirely. I said I didn't care how you made your photographs. When I see a finished photograph on the wall I never ask if it is cropped. (In a teaching situation I might, but not in any other, ever.)
Now, I'm not the only one who feels cropping is not a good thing for a photographer to do IN TERMS OF THEIR OWN EXPERIENCE AND GROWTH.

If some don' t care about that; fine with me.

I assume at least some care is taken when exposing a negative-any format. That at the moment it was taken you thought it was "right." And then you get into the darkroom and second guess yourselves. Sure the pictures might be better that way, but as I said I don' t think that is the point. But let's assume that is the point. I believe that disciplining yourself to be more careful at the moment of exposure will result in many more winners than if you rely on cropping.

Interestingly, 95% of the time in our workshops when we look at a print that someone has cropped and he or she has the full frame one withthem, the full frame one is better. What is hapening is that in the field gains are being made in vision. But THINKING about it later screws it up and the pictures get cropped to the boring tried and true.

More later. Press check.

Continuing:

Back around 1970 I had a student working in 35MM doing very spontaneous street photography. He cropped everything. I told him his photographs were better uncropped. He went and made new ones. He did not crop. He sent this new photographs to Creative Camera in England. Three months later they appeared in the magazine.

More to follow.

Cartier-Bresson, in his Intro to Decisive Moment, also expressed an anit-cropping view ( don't have it with me so can't quote). His argument relates to the importance of the creative moment when capturing the image. If someone can offer the quote from this work, it might be of benefit to this thread.

I believe that those who make "straight" photographs and who rely on cropping are doing themsemves a disservice. I don't care if anyone crops or not. But I do suggest that if you want to grow as a photographer that you will try to be disciplined and try to get it right the first time. And if you do not, figure out why and get it right the second time. I hope it goes without saying, but thought I better say it anyhow, that if you see the picture you want but you don't have the right focallength lens and know ahead of time that you will be cropping--to me that's not cropping.

Good luck everyone. The mosy important thing, as I have said before, is the pleasure in the process. If you have that, the hell with everything else.

A Cartier-Bresson quote:

For photographers, there are two kinds of selection to be made, and either of them can lead to eventual regrets. There is the selection we make when we look through the view-finder at the subject and there is the one we make after the films have been devloped and printed....When its too late, then you know with a terrrible clarity where you failed; and at this point you often recall the telltale feeling you had while you were actaually making the pictures. Was it a feeling of hesitation due to uncertainty?... Or was it ( and this is more frequent) that your glance became vague, your eye wandered off? ...
Our task is to perceive reality, almost simultaneously recording it in the sketchbook which is our camera. We must neither try to manipulate reality while we are shooting, nor must we manipulate the results in a darkroom. These tricks are patently discernible to those who have eyes to see.

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I. personally, am an Adams fan; but can a reliance on darkroom manipulation to salvage a negative lead one to using digital manipulation? Then we do lose some of the essence of photography.

IMHO there are few photographs which can't be improved by some judicious cropping. Whether one does it in the camera or in the darkroom is a matter of little or no importance. To claim that in-the-camera is the only way to do it, or even the best way is basically one-upsmanship and pure snobbery. It is the result that counts, not how one gets there.

This is a quote from the [ Ansel Adams at 100 ] site at the San Fransisco Museum Of Modern Art:

"Edward Weston was the eldest and most established figure in Group f.64. In his journal he noted, "Some have expressed astonishment that I would join a group, having gone my own way for years." Indeed, Weston openly worried in 1932 about how aesthetic theories too often "crystallize into academic dullness" and "bind one in a straight jacket of logic."

I love that last line. Makes one wonder if we are, in fact, TRYING to "bind ourselves into straight jackets of logic".

A wonderful insight into the "being" of a genius.

Back on January 30, Michael A. Smith in this thread recommended "Photographers on Photography" an out of print book, as containing Cartier-Bresson's "The Decisive Moment" as well as other worthwhile essays. I went over to eBay, and a copy was for sale.

Even though there were several days left on the auction, I put in a bid, as I was going out of town. I thought some of you other APUGers would find the auction and outbid me. When I returned home, I was surprised to find that, not only had I won the auction, but no one else had bid.

I've only begun to read the book, but I'll assure you Bernice Abbott's attack on the salon pictorialists alone is worth the purchase price.

This all raises the question - do the rest of you already have this book? Has everyone else already read it?
juan

I picked up my copy thru bookfinder.com (didn't think of looking on eBay, otherwise we might have been bidding on same item). Great non-technical writing comparable to LensWorks. I read so much of the how-to's that its nice to read articles on why we photograph by actual photographers rather than critics ( Sontag, Barthes, Berger, etc..).

I started reading "Through another lens" by Charis Wilson. It is refreshing to read the story from the other perspective. So far (just past chapter 1) it is an easy read, and very well written. I got a used copy on Amazon for about $10.

Thanks to this thread, I purchased & started to read Weston's Daybooks. An interesting statement , "I told him that my photographs were entirely free from premeditation, that what I was to do was never presented to me until seen on the groundglass, and that the final print was usually an unchanged, untrimmed reproduction of what I had felt at the time of exposure". Think this would be hard to achieve with any LF camera, especially an 8X10.

doughowk said:

An interesting statement , "I told him that my photographs were entirely free from premeditation, that what I was to do was never presented to me until seen on the groundglass, and that the final print was usually an unchanged, untrimmed reproduction of what I had felt at the time of exposure". Think this would be hard to achieve with any LF camera, especially an 8X10.

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Why? And why would it be especially difficult with an 8x10? We all see differently and have different ways of working. Some of us 'create' photographs before we ever set up the camera while others of us discover photographs as we view whats in front of us on the ground glass. So I was just wandering, what part from that quoted section of the Daybooks would be especially difficult and why?

Two sources introduced me to view cameras for the first time back in the late 70's, The Daybooks of Edward Weston and Fred Picker's Zone VI Newsletters. Before these, I had used a 35mm for about 12 months but I had never even heard of a view camera. I guess I grew up thinking that the way to use a view camera was to find something that interested you, point the camera at it and start moving the camera around on the tripod until what you see on the ground glass is what you wanted. How do people here interpret the Daybook quote in relation to their own photography?

In searching for the "Contrast Control" information, I came across the September 1987 Issue of "Darkroom Photography" (later - "Camera and Darkroom"), Entitled "The Weston Eye", by Charis Wilson. More insights into the being/ doing of a truly significant "light" in photography, written by another "significant light":

" This information was not to be gleaned from Edward's discussions with other photographers, since these tended to revolve around technical matters - how to get rid of blue stains or what would cause desensitized spots in film. Nor was Edward a rewarding source when questioned directly. Except for wanting photographs to be sharp - and photographers to adhere to their medium - he had very little to say about technique, and even less about aesthetics. In his view, the picture making faculty must develop out of an individual's whole response to life; thus any "rules of composition" were meaningless formulas, and could only lead to the production of meaningless work. My understanding of the Weston eye had to be achieved by direct observation, and I become an inverterate observer, looking on the ground glass after every exposure."

Charis wrote of the photograph "Glass, Lily, and Rubbish, 1939", a still life that Weston spent a lot of time in arranging:

"I do not mean that he consciously intended to do this while making the picture. He often said, "When I find myself stopping to think, I know I'm on the wrong track." When Edward photographed, he tuned out the thought processes - and simply opened his eyes to all that lay before him. If his picture was there, he usually saw it instantly, almost as if it leaped out and demanded to be photographed. In the absence of such compulsion, he either pointed his camera elsewhere or he out it away.
That kind of seeing - intuitive, intense and immediate - was the essence of his creative gift. He may have honed his technical skills over the years, but ultimately, when we are confronted with his photographs, it is the Weston vision we respond to; it is the Weston eye that we are somehow seeing into as well as staring out of."

With articles like this, is it any wonder why "Darkroom Photography - Camera and Darkroom", is so highly esteemed even now, so long after its demise?

More later, from the next article, "What is a Purist?", by Edward Weston.

Another quote from Darkroom Photography, September, 1987, p. 27:

"What is a Purist?"

"Many people think that Purists start with intellectual premises and have technique as their end. My work is never intellectual. I never make a negative unless emotionally moved by my subject. And certainly I have no interest in technique for its own sake. Technique is only the means to an end. If my technique is adequate for my seeing, that is enough."

And:

"I know and care a great deal about composition. I admit I don't know the rules of composition and I don't know the lingo, because I have gained my knowledge through work and observation. Pictures came first. Rules followed. No one ever became an artist by learning rules and keeping them. It takes a good deal more than that. A person might be a demon at composition and still have nothing to say."

- Edward Weston, from an article which first appeared in the January, 1939 issue of Camera Craft magazine.

"Technique is only the means to an end. If my technique is adequate for my seeing, that is enough."

Very true. Good technique is important but I think sometimes we all get way to caught-up in technique. Almost to the point of making the seeing secondary to the technique.

I think there is a disjunct between Weston's view of himself as an intuitive photographer and the reality of how he worked. For example, he spent days working on a toilet bowl image using numerous exposures & prints - even trying cropping - before he was satisfied with one. This is a very methodical photographer, not a seize the moment Cartier-Bresson. Over 30 numbered prints of peppers indicates a perfectionist.

As I follow this thread, I am struck by the similarity of what Weston seems to be saying to the eastern precepts of "experiencing directly". While I don't want to get off into a "spiritual" discussion, I do think that there is a great deal of validity to that practice.

I find myself, normally, with a preconceived notion of what I want to photograph. Furthermore the judgement of this is "meaningful" or this is "not beautiful enough" to portray is there too.

I need to consciously bring myself past that immediate mind set. To see what is there before me on the ground glass...interesting that this is an act of "experiencing directly". By that I mean with no judgements, not even a matter of identifying objects. Simply to see.

I think that view cameras make this act easier...Why? because when I am under a darkcloth with all of the extraneous "chatter" shut away...then the composition comes to be.