Adams, however, did produce a genre-defining style of work, and if you read his bio on the Wikipedia page, he was in constant contact with other artists who were both his contemporaries and his seniors, through whom he would no doubt have gotten exposure to art history.
because he was just continuing the same sort of photography
timothy o sullivan did a few years before him, almost photographing the same things
and who knows maybe even the same tripod holes, like all the lovers of his work do with his tripod holes ...
Haters?
Just askin', John...
Ken
are you suggesting he invented a genre that didn't exist before him?
if you are suggesting this, i find this hard to believe
because he was just continuing the same sort of photography
timothy o sullivan did a few years before him, almost photographing the same things
and who knows maybe even the same tripod holes, like all the lovers of his work do with his tripod holes ...
i guess the OP will return in 3 years ...
but i do miss walking by
hand the hatters place in boston !
are you suggesting he invented a genre that didn't exist before him?
if you are suggesting this, i find this hard to believe
because he was just continuing the same sort of photography
timothy o sullivan did a few years before him, almost photographing the same things
and who knows maybe even the same tripod holes, like all the lovers of his work do with his tripod holes ...
i guess the OP will return in 3 years ...
As has been said several times above, we don't live in a vacuum, surely some exposure came early for Adams and I do agree that Adams got an education in photographic history but it also seems apparent that his inspiration came before his formal education or serious study of photography.
Galen Rowell and Joe Buissink I think are very reasonable examples of commercially successful photographers who like Adams turned a hobby into a successful vocation.
I believe that Rowell, Buissink, and Adams each have a couple very important things besides photography in common though. They are/were commercially astute to begin with and they each had/have passions/inspirations they wanted to share with the world.
These guys didn't start out to be visual artists. Adams was studying to be a pianist, Rowell was in the automotive business, Buissink was studying for a Phd in psychology.
Their artistic inspiration was driven by wanting to express/share their moments/experiences/emotions with others. Yosemite for Adams, climbing for Rowell, and emotions for Buissink. Photography in a sense for these guys was simply a convenient tool.
The important questions after the inspiration are present tense, like "what tools and skills do I need?" and "who is my competition?" not past tense, like "what would Stieglitz have done?".
We're wandering off topic a bit, but I guess it depends on what you consider a "genre" to be. You'd never mistake O'Sullivan's photos for f/64 work; apart from technical differences, they don't really have that central "ain't nature grand" vibe that sort of defines Adams. The influence is obvious, but personally I wouldn't say "same genre", except in the very broad sense in which "landscapes in the American West" is a genre.
That line of discussion was getting interesting, I thought, and I hope he didn't leave in a huff.
-NT
Does he also make, restore and repair fine knobs?
Ken
I should also point out, the term "fine art photography" has been usurped as a polite way of saying "nude model photography".
I don't get why modern young aspiring photographers should care about Capa, Adams, Stieglitz or whoever ruled in the last century or even care about how a darkroom works and how to make archival FB silverprints. They learn the trade, use of digital cameras and PS techniques from modern "photographers" who themselves only barely know the traditional techniques. when talking HDR this and that, strobism and multilayering (or what ever these all sharp insect shots are called) there is not much sence in refering to historic masters and how they squezed a 7stop ranging subject into a 4stop paper without loosing the slightest tonality. They learn from Hobby and Mcnally and other masters of this current era. They look at images posted on the web where they are readily available and why should they care what us old farts think.
Best regards
I don't get why modern young aspiring photographers should care about Capa, Adams, Stieglitz or whoever ruled in the last century or even care about how a darkroom works and how to make archival FB silverprints. They learn the trade, use of digital cameras and PS techniques from modern "photographers" who themselves only barely know the traditional techniques. when talking HDR this and that, strobism and multilayering (or what ever these all sharp insect shots are called) there is not much sence in refering to historic masters and how they squezed a 7stop ranging subject into a 4stop paper without loosing the slightest tonality. They learn from Hobby and Mcnally and other masters of this current era. They look at images posted on the web where they are readily available and why should they care what us old farts think.
Best regards
i wouldn't have said "ain't nature grande' but i would have considered adam's work to be more like the grand landscape ..
aside from massive manipulations, at the taking and printing stage, i would suggest that the survey work osullivan did
for the federal government, if printed in the same "full scale" way ... if osullivan had film and enlarging paper / instead of
a tent filled with ether fumes, glass plates and cyanide ... ( to me at least ) maybe they would look pretty much the same.
AND if osullivan
was shooting dry plates instead of wet plates, he probably would have been using the system a lot of people used to manipulate
a negative at the taking stage to get a full scale negative, which adams renamed the zone system, and people mistakenly think he invented.
getting back to the questions though, neither adams nor osullivan were shooting in a vacuum. they were both professionals, and well connected ....
and would have easily known what others were up to, whether those others were dead or alive ...
You think? I've just been looking with some attention at O'Sullivan (I bought _Framing The West_, prompted by a recent thread on him), and I feel like the narrative of his photos is fundamentally different from Adams's. O'Sullivan's landscapes are rougher, more dangerous, and more inhabited---the whole storyline of Adams's grand-landscape work is about the *pristine* landscape, which I submit was not a primary concern for a guy who kept putting his developing tent in the photo!
Yeah, I'd agree with that, and in general he might well have gravitated to most of the same techniques as Adams if he'd had the materials. I still get very different artistic voices from them, and I tend to think Adams deserves credit for the cultural birth of that pristine-grand-landscape gestalt in photography, even if he *did* reuse O'Sullivan's tripod holes to do it. (Indeed I think it speaks quite well of both of them that they could tell two different stories about the same raw material.)
I think we are going to have to agree to disagree. IMO traditions simply promote the status quo.
If you take a look at advances in any field, they advance not by casting away tradition but by building on it. (i.e., calculus from basic mathematics; fried tomatoes from learning about not eating the leaves; science always begins with learning what the people that came before us observed and studied and believed. They were not always right, but imagine a science course trying to discover the Higgs Boson which did away with everything we had studied about atoms and chemicals and physics and started fresh with reinventing mathematics and trying to build a theory about thermodynamics?)
Unfortunately for those people who don't care about the past, tradition is the very groundwork and foundation for progress & invention.
Are you trying to equate "traditional knowledge" with "scientific knowledge"? It seems so. We don't use the laws of thermodynamics because "the old guys used them and we should know what they did"; we use them because they accurately describe the universe. No one's talking about reinventing mathematics.
Self-expression through photography isn't science.
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