Loss of fine art photography tradition

[removed account4]

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.

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 ...

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

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

 

[removed account4]

Haters?

Just askin', John...

Ken

naaah i don't hate anything ... or anyone
life's too short to waste energy on something
as pointless as that ...
but i do miss walking by
hand the hatters place in boston !
http://www.csmonitor.com/1988/1011/rhat.html

 

[Alan Johnson]

This does not answer the question of whether the tradition has been lost but fine art photography is attracting more buyers:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathryntully/2012/12/09/the-steady-rise-of-fine-art-photography/
It's a financial risk to support new artists as ever. IMO in the UK Rankin is worth watching,some of his work is traditional, some not.

 

[ntenny]

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 ...

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.

i guess the OP will return in 3 years ...

That line of discussion was getting interesting, I thought, and I hope he didn't leave in a huff.

-NT

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

but i do miss walking by
hand the hatters place in boston !

Does he also make, restore and repair fine knobs?

Ken

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

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 ...

I'm not saying Adams invented a genre - rather he collaboratively (with Weston, Cunningham, et al) gave birth and name to a style and a philosophy of photography, which was a direct response to and reaction against Pictorialism (which both Weston and Adams were practitioners of in their early careers).

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

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?".

I don't think we're talking about commercially successful photographers here - we can give plenty of examples of commercially successful photographers who neither advanced the medium nor understood a whit of art (or even photo) history. And I don't think that even academically trained artists, let alone innovators and game-changers, ask, "what would Stieglitz have done" but rather - "Stieglitz did this. I'm not going to do this, but something different...".

 

[removed account4]

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

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.
whether he had a bunch of people running around with him saying " photography should have everything in focus ( + HDR bla bla bla the rest of the f64 manifesto )"
i don't really think is important. if you have ever seen some of osullivan's giant plates you soon realize he was probably every bit of an (anal retentive) perfectionist as adams was ... his subject matter was similar ... and well, adams and him kind of sort of shot in the same vein.
i haven't seem much of osullivan's portrait work but i am guessing since he was also a portraitist ( from what i remember ) his portraits were
probably stiff, mainly because of the materials, while adam's portraits were stiff because it seemed to be more of a stretch for him.

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 ...
it is hard to imagine someone, even someone learning photography in the 1850s and in persia, doing it in a vacuum ...

 

[removed account4]

Does he also make, restore and repair fine knobs?

Ken

not sure ken
he's long gone ..

his shop was behind the haden building ... last surviving hh richardson commercial block ... in boston's "combat zone"
... last i noticed he was there was in the mid 90s ...
they re-did the hayden building around 1996-7ish maybe he left from all the construction, and
that now the cheep-rent-red-light-district was going "upscale" ...

 

[viridari]

I started with a DSLR in about 2007. I bought it to take family photos, and through a strange chain of happy accidents I ended up also shooting models and getting some notice in this small town.

A friend, a co-worker really, asked me to set aside a Saturday so he could show me a few things regarding photography. We met for beers, and he saw a few of my early works who's better qualities were more a factor of luck and statistics (if you take 1,000 photos, one or two will look pretty good). He reached into his bag and pulled out this antique camera that I just wanted to look at and admire for awhile. It was a Mamiya C330.

We spent a couple of hours going through the operation of the camera, how to use a light meter, the sunny 16 rule, and basics of coming up with a good exposure. He let me borrow that camera for a few months, gave me a bag of random ancient expired film from his freezer, and then said one thing that changed my life forever: "Some of this work you're doing now, it reminds me of Robert Mapplethorpe".

That's it. It was over for me as soon as I looked up Mapplethorpe. I could never again go back to life as I once knew it.

Learning about Mapplethorpe led me to Arbus, Avedon, Newton, Weegee, et al. I started studying their works, trying to understand their techniques, and applying what I'd learned to my own aesthetic. I started reading Ansel Adams to understand the confluence of art & science. Heck, I even took some drawing classes (something I still can't do) for no other reason than to try to gain a more concrete understanding of what I see in the mind's eye so that I might capture it better on film.

Here we are now in 2013, and I spent all day Saturday with the fellow who got me started with the Mamiya (I own three of those Mamiyas now, and they remain my favorite camera). This time I was toting around a Crown Graphic, handheld, and fired off all of three photos for an all day walkabout.

I'm not going to say the new breed of photographers is wrong, but in the strictest sense they are mostly ignorant. I shoot film, but I also shoot more modern hardware, and my experience with film and learning about the old masters has helped me with both forms.

 

[viridari]

I should also point out, the term "fine art photography" has been usurped as a polite way of saying "nude model photography".

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

I should also point out, the term "fine art photography" has been usurped as a polite way of saying "nude model photography".

Not really. A lot of people use that term to mean so many different things it's kind of lost meaning. Yes, nude photography that isn't blatantly pornographic often gets labeled "fine art photography" for the sake of providing a genteel cover for guys who want to stare at boobs all day. But it also does legitimately refer to Ansel Adams et al. The thing that rubs me the wrong way with the term is that it implies there is a "coarse art" photography, and perhaps a "medium art" photography, as well as an artless photography. How do you draw those distinctions? Nudes can certainly fit in all of the above, as can landscape, portrait and just about any other category of photograph.

 

[Soeren]

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

 

[PKM-25]

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

Wow....that is like saying history classes should be dropped from all school curriculum, entirely ignorant sir.

Except Ansel, I had no idea who any of those old masters were when I was in my teens and early 20's. But as I grew up, got more work and got better, I sought out the info for my self. David Hobby and McNally are not in any way shape or form at the level of mastery of who are truly considered masters by the way, they are mostly marketing sell-outs and will never have the historical impact of the aforementioned. They also won't have a nice print sale like Nick Brandt's 60x80 African elephant at 215K. There is a big difference between a fine art photographer and two guys who now make most of their incomes off of teaching gear laden workshops my friend....

 

[viridari]

There are still modern masters. Sebastião Salgado, anyone? (Just one prominent example)

 

[ntenny]

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'm not sure how much this post was tongue-in-cheek, but to the extent that it's serious, I think you're conflating technique (which of course is often highly specific to materials and workflow) with artistic concerns (which mostly aren't). The OP and most of this thread were, I think, talking mainly about the latter.

That said, I think if I were going to send an aspiring photographer forth to learn about the artistic uses of lighting, the first name I pulled out wouldn't be a photographer, it'd be Goya. Apart from techniques, I'm not sure there's any special reason why photographers should be privileged over painters in the *artistic* education of an aspiring photographer; composition is composition whether it's rendered in silver or oil or pixels, right? But you never hear photographic educators complaining that their students have never seen a Renoir.

-NT

 

[ntenny]

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.

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!

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.

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.)

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 ...

Agreed. I think we got here from someone's suggestion that St Ansel sprang fully formed from the brow of an activated silver-halide grain, or something, which might be a *tiny* bit exaggerated.

I don't think anyone learns in a vacuum, but I do think canons tend to be overrated.

-NT

 

[removed account4]

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!

i think you are right ... ansel adam's work was made to be "art" or "fine art" or "a sierra club calender" and
o'sullivan made the photographs for the federal government to record the property they had just "bought" ... surveys so they could make maps.
definitely different "genres" but sort of the same. ...

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.)

who knows what would have happened if their places in history were swapped. if ansel adams was the government contractor and osullivan was the "artist" ...
i think adam's work might have looked like osullivan's ( except for the tent )
and osullivan would have had 20 shades of grey because his materials would have allowed it.

we are lucky to live in a time where we can easily see work of a bizillion different photographers or painters or ... just a keystroke away
it wasn't too long ago that traveling shows that presented magic lantern slides + stereoscopic views &c were common ...

 

[horacekenneth]

I think we are going to have to agree to disagree. IMO traditions simply promote the status quo.

I don't disagree there! Traditions do promote a kind of status quo. Traditions promote what we've learned in the past, which is a good thing to know. As someone else pointed out, if we didn't have tradition they would never have figured out that you could eat tomato fruit because they would've kept dying from the leaves.

What I think you don't like Mark is stodgy people who are afraid of new things. Unfortunately, stodgy people who are afraid of new things tend to love tradition above all else, so tradition gets conflated with the dislike of advancing and newness.

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.

 

[moose10101]

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.

 

[horacekenneth]

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.

My point is simply that tradition is important. Obviously that looks different in different fields. The law of thermodynamics works. We don't start new everytime. Ideas in art work or don't work. Successful artists know about them and build on them.

 

[Thomas Bertilsson]

Where did David Kachel go?

I think the reason why more stuff floods to places like museums and galleries, is that it really doesn't take much to make a print anymore. But if you weed through all of the mediocrity, (something modern day society seems good at producing), you will find little glimmers of hope. As David Little says, curator of photography at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts - "The cream tends to float to the top". It's just that there's a lot more noise to filter out.

A great friend of mine gave his teenage daughter a camera, a 35mm SLR, because she was interested. Having studied only whatever art history and photography school imposed on her, she took pictures. After developing the film, a contact sheet was made, and then my master printer friend took a couple of shots and made darkroom prints from them. Beautiful work, that we all admired.
With no formal training, she took pictures and had fun. But without the guidance of her more experienced father those pictures would have amounted to exactly nothing. Instead something wonderful was created.
In a small and isolated event, I am trying to describe how an 'untrained' eye, and an experienced one, coexist and draw from each other to make good art.

Fresh vision can come from minds that have not yet been too cluttered with other people's thoughts, too many social norms, and what the art world expects. There's a purity to it that's undeniable.
Experience, history, and knowledge can help realize this vision, and make amazing works of art.

Isn't the ideal state of creating art to maintain a fresh vision of the world around us, but at the same time learn from others how to realize our vision?

Basically: We can't talk about one thing without mentioning the other, and it's our duty to help guide those that come after us, to learn how to materialize their dreams and their ideas, but doing so without destroying the innocence, clarity, and purity.

 

[cliveh]

"standing on the shoulders of giants"

 

[Bob Carnie]

When I first started my sabattier solarization project , I found inspiration in Man Rays body of work and the work of Ed Buffaloe.
I have tried to keep my work as distinctly different as possible. It is fun to look at their work, now after about 10 years of making my own prints and see we indeed have the same black and white maki lines and from that point the work is completely different.