Both are exactly the same thing. Working to make a photograph look like a painting. At least making a painting look like a photograph can have some appeal.
Not sure we're talking about "pictorialism." How about "Bad Pictorialism"?
When Vaughn brought up kitchy redwood pictures, I had to chuckle. Last year, we received a nature calendar with a picture for a particular month with a pristine gray wolf howling among the sword ferns, right in a shaft of sunlight falling between classic old growth redwood trees up there in his neighborhood. Wolves have been extinct around here for over a century; and the light and timing was, er, kinda remarkable remarkable. Another month had a shot of a plump large cougar lying right inside the window of Landscape Arch, right at the smack of dawn sunrise, in Arches NP. Another incredible coincidence of timing. And yet neither of those looked a bit like composite PS-faked images to me. They were entirely believable, and for a very simple reason. Where else would you find perfectly fluffy furred plump animals without a sign of a battle scar on them other than a trained pet? Does an improbable pose comprise a fake scene, or just another model setup? Of course, the use of those kinds of shots is rather sleazy if one is anticipating some kind of authenticity in a promotional calendar from a wildlife or nature preservation association.
Hmm... you better tell that to the person who just paid the highest price on record for a very fuzzy distinctly pictorial early Steichen print. Or how about the graphic mastery of Gertrude Kasebier, or Edward Weston's own early work? You can find bad practitioners anywhere - bad abstract painters, bad landscape painters, bad Impressionist painters, bad realist painters, bad photo-realist painters. Why should the broad swath of photography be any different? There are a helluva lot of sharp lousy photographs out there too. And the two fields - painting and photography - have influenced each other as long as they've been parallel. It's never been a one-way street. Some practitioners do both. .... but hopefully not in a morgue like Williiam Mortuarysen or J.P. Witkin. I hold my nose around those kinds of images.
I don’t see how one can see aesthetic value in Man Ray and nothing in Mortensen at the same time. Bias aside it makes little sense.
Man Ray was a masterful photographer as well as a great painter and artist in general.
While he may not have pioneered any of the techniques he used, he often took them to a whole new level, or brought them their logical conclusion.
As a (sort of) dadaist and surrealist he very much flirted with the kitschy and the cliche. But he did it with a very intelligent pre-postmodernist sensibility.
Something completely alien to Mortensen.
Show me anything from Mortensen that even approaches the quality of the above.
I am really curious what you are meaning by quality. The portraits of Picasso and Dali are plain Jane and the final landscape looks like it was an afterthought that could have been taken by literally anyone. Man Ray did some amazing work, like the tears image above, but like most artists he also did a lot of uninspired crap.
I am not super fond of Mortensen but saying his work wasn't quality means you have a lack of understanding of what quality means, or are you applying your opinion to the word?
Personally I don't fall for the hagiography of artists. Just because Adams was popular doesn't make him the greatest. Weston was a far more interesting photographer than vanilla Adams. Adams was a competent technician but I wouldn't even call him an artist. A better "Adams" could be made today because the medium has advanced. Try making a better Pepper #30 though.
The very fact that Man Ray could shoot these two titans tells you much of what you need to know about him.
They were contemporaries and frequented the same brothels.
Man Ray was a masterful photographer as well as a great painter and artist in general.
While he may not have pioneered any of the techniques he used, he often took them to a whole new level, or brought them to their logical conclusion.
As a (sort of) dadaist and surrealist he very much flirted with the kitschy and the cliche. But he did it with a very intelligent pre-postmodernist sensibility.
Something completely alien to Mortensen.
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Show me anything from Mortensen that even approaches the quality of the above.
I don’t see how one can see aesthetic value in Man Ray and nothing in Mortensen at the same time. Bias aside it makes little sense.
Rey - Masterful Photographer ? He did make photographs, and many were unorthodox for the time, he was injected into the Hall Of Fame of that era, apparently by powerful forces. I am not going to even try to diminish his stature and I know he has some hard core supporters. I have no obligation to jump all in and agree, nor not appreciate what Mortensen had done.
And Mortensen's technical writings were at top of game in those days, and still hold a lot of value today. In several ways, on technical side, I have him quite ahead of AA. Being good at teaching is of course never a guarantee of making good on it in actual creativity.
As for photographs, one can see value in Mortensen, or ... not. But quite a few from one overlap with the other, and that is all I said: if one can appreciate Rey, there is no way he completely ditches Mortensen, I the is honest to himself of course.
His technical teachings are common stuff, at the time too, wrapped in mystery and alternative nomenclature.
There is nothing technically amazing about his techniques.
It’s plain old pictorialism, with all the connected ideas.
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