• Welcome to Photrio!
    Registration is fast and free. Join today to unlock search, see fewer ads, and access all forum features.
    Click here to sign up

Is straight photography dead?

Chuck_P said:
I personally prefer one subject matter on one negative presented on one print.
Click to expand...

I am using this springboard to remember the incredible Don Hong Oai, a Chinese photographer who lived in Vietnam for many years before coming to California in the 1970s. He printed amazing landscapes reminiscent of Chinese ink scrolls, that he created from multiple negatives.

Don Hong-Oai

Don Hong-Oai was one of the last pictorialist photographers and arguably the best. His evocative landscapes, produced from multiple negatives are idealized scenes. As such, in the tradition of Chin…
www.escapeintolife.com

A brilliant artist RIP.
 

I like his work especially the Chinese lettering that he adds to the print. Don't now what it says maybe someone else here does.
 

I love Ansel Adams, admire a lot of his work, but I have to say, "photographs that look like photographs" has got to be, in retrospect, the most absurd, nonsensical statement ever uttered about photography . A photograph can only look like the thing photographed, to paraphrase Winogrand, and I certainly hope that that's what Adams meant.

What Adams couldn't (or didn't want to) see was that the medium contained within itself possibilities which, through exploration and experimentation, would lead to the development of new art forms that had nothing to do with existing art forms. One can point at the development of abstract photography in the 60s and 70s, but that Adams would write such a statement at a time when people such as Sudek, Man Ray or Moholy-Nagy were starting to explore the possibilities of the medium shows that there was a bit narrow-mindedness at work, or, at least, an ignorance of what was going on elsewhere (understandable in a context in which information wasn't as readily available as today).
 

A fellow photographer criticizes my landscape kallitypes as too "painterly," and says I should make photographs that look like photographs. Like Eggleston, he says. But I don't want to be a second-rate Eggleston.

I get his point. But there's room enough for all tastes. In the end, we all spend way too much time in the taxonomic weeds. I'd rather go make stuff.
 

Ansel was referring to (and rebelling against) Pictorialist imaging...photos, heavily allegorical, soft focus, heavily retouched (Mortensen), or using artistic printing techniques like Bromoil, Gum Prints, etc. (think Robert Demachy, early Steichen, etc.).
Taken in that context, "a photograph that looks like a photograph" just means 'a photograph that isn't trying to emulate a Salon painting'.
 
Alan Edward Klein said:
I like his work especially the Chinese lettering that he adds to the print. Don't now what it says maybe someone else here does.
Click to expand...

If I remember correctly from art history classes, in many cases, the inscriptions were the name of the owner/collector. In other cases they could be comments made by a viewer.
 

Exactly my point. Seeing things in a somewhat manichean manner, straight photography vs pictorialism, was a bit narrow-minded. Surrealist-inspired French photography, Bauhaus-inspired German photography, formalist-inspired Russian photography were already taking the medium places that had nothing to do with either pictorialism or what f/64 were doing. In that larger context "a photograph that looks like a photograph" is meaningless.
 

What about Autochromes? They are often soft in focus simply due to subject movement required by the long exposure times and the nature of the medium.
 
Craig said:
What about Autochromes? They are often soft in focus simply due to subject movement required by the long exposure times and the nature of the medium.
Click to expand...
I can't answer for Ansel or f64...but it might be determined by subject matter or treatment.
 
Garry Winogrand said it well:
"I take photographs in order to find out what something will look like photographed".
And Diane Arbus said so many relevant things about this, including: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
 

Ansel and f64 were pretty much US-centric.
 
Edward Weston was a rabid exponent of f/64, despite his own pedigree in pictorialist style and formative personal development under Mexican influences. Not one of them really practiced what they preached, at least for very long. Calling them US-centric doesn't make a lot of sense when AA's greatest advocate, Stiegliz, was also the US front door to European modernist painters as well as to public acceptance of Pictorialism itself; he himself was somewhere in the middle, just like EW for a long time. AA socialized with a very eclectic circle of artists; the notion his own esthetic lineage was derived from "Romanticist" landscape painters like Bierstadt is nonsense.

All these labels and superficial stereotypes wear awfully thin after awhile.
 
Last edited:
Bingo. Steichen. Highest price ever paid for a photo so far was for an verrrrry pictorialistic-style Steichen. Yet he later became a very conspicuously "black is black, white is white", "sharp is sharp" silver gelatin printer. If anything, Steichen was versatile, and proved that one can indeed between of jack of all trades, yet at master of several of them too. And yes, he too put together some very influential shows of other photographers.
 

I love that picture. I think it's the high hat that does it.

The Flatiron Building Canvas Print / Canvas Art by Edward Steichen

Purchase a canvas print of the painting "The Flatiron Building" by Edward Steichen. All canvas prints are professionally printed, assembled, and shipped within 3 - 4 business days and delivered ready-to-hang on your wall. Choose from multiple print sizes, border colors, and canvas materials.
fineartamerica.com
 
The hat was probably used to develop the film in.
 

A cropped photography which did not change the meaning of how she looked at the time. But since you now have questions, divorce her and make a clean start.
 
Ansel and Imogan blessing Jerry. What was straight photography again?

Photo by Ted Organ (Orland) used for educational purposes:

TED (Orland) TALK • Carmel Visual Arts

TED Orland TALK register below On Monday, May 16, 2016 at 6:30pm, Carmel Visual Arts will host Photographer Ted Orland who will be offering a lecture which will be illustrated with examples from his own artwork and seasoned with snapshots capturing the flavor of the local scene. Ted will recount...
www.carmelvisualarts.com
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register