Why do you think Ansel Adams is better known than William Mortensen?

[Sirius Glass]

I was one of them when I first studied photography 35 years ago. I still think he's one of the greats. I was missing the point. Ansel Adams went against convention of pictorialism. Seeing him as a deity misses the point. Photography can't grow if we just follow photo-gods. True for everything else.

Gee, you missed the sarcasm.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well, as long as we're being cynical, and if you owned an original 16X20 print by AA, as well as a 16X20 by Mortensen, and didn't really care for either, and an auctioneer showed up at your doorstep, which would you show him? Hmm... that's a tough one; would I want to make $40,000 or $40 ???

 

[removed account4]

John, people are not turning Ansel Adams into a deity, he has been a deity for many decades.

I didn't necessarily mean right now .. people have been using his tripod holes and preaching his ghospel for a long time

 

[Deleted member 88956]

probably this is true ... I mean he was doing a lot of the things people nowadays take for granted, like jerry uelsmann. I can appreciate some of the work AA did but I get bored with it kind of quickly because it is so common now to see some sort of everything in focus dramatic landscape, especially from the same tripod holes as AA. Not that it didn't take imagination to do that sort of work (and have the right avenues and people chatting about it to make you famous) its too bad AA and his pals through Mortenson under the bus, it would be interesting to see what photography would be like today if his career would have been able to have continued success using the techniques he wrote about.
thinking about it, I'm not sure if it is the AA imagery I am tired of or the people going on and on and on and on about how he invented the zone system and turning him into a Deity and hunting for his tripod holes. I got WM's the negative book for my birthday recently, I find it to be less dry and more interesting than AA's book with the same name I got 32 years ago..

WM On the Negative is one of the few great works on the subject, and different at that too.

I'd also venture to say Mortensen's work could teach one more on composition than AA's work, partly because of perpetuality of AA presence everywhere making it ever more dificult to see past its visual appeal. But also because AA piece comes through with its totality of image/sharpness/contrast/detail vs. WM which gives play of elements easy to see how they create the image.

 

[Vaughn]

I was sitting drinking my tea, thinking about whatever drifted thru my view. And about this thread.

I was part of a university photo program for a few decades...as a student, volunteer and then employee...1977 until I retired in 2015. The university is in northern California, just up the coast from the epicenter of 'West Coast Photography'. Just before my time the university had AA up for a talk and I. Cunningham up for a workshop. But thinking back on all the years there, as a student, then helping students, AA was rarely mentioned. He was not held up as a saint of photography...important, yes. The head prof while I was a student knew AA, but he did primarily street and natural light portraits. The senior photo prof during some of my employed years was making work that makes WM's work appear shallow and tame. Thomas Joshua Cooper who taught there while I was a student was influenced by AA, took AA's advice about sticking with 5x7 instead of moving up to 11x14, but TJC did not teach, think, or produce work like AA.

All this to say that I believe many people build up AA in order to knock him down....they claim that others see and worship him as a saint, so that they have a debate point...straw man argument, I believe. Both AA and WM were lucky people. They both had a love of photography as an art form and both were able to shape their lives around this love. They both gave through their teaching abilities and thus also received much back. Both are now dead, both are remembered.

 

[138S]

All this to say that I believe many people build up AA in order to knock him down....they claim that others see and worship him as a saint, so that they have a debate point...straw man argument, I believe. Both AA and WM were lucky people. They both had a love of photography as an art form and both were able to shape their lives around this love. They both gave through their teaching abilities and thus also received much back. Both are now dead, both are remembered.

It cannot be said in a better way...

 

[DREW WILEY]

Composition? Much of Mortensen's works were conspicuous plays on former painting genre - a self-portrait with a background resembling that in the Mona Lisa, compositions mimicking those of the era of Napoleon III, stereotypical pre-Raphaelite pictorial subjects in the midst of a textbook on psychoanalysis, if you get my drift. Obvious inferences, clues right in your face like a Three Stooges pie fight. That's what I don't like about him. If you look at the kind of photography the surrealists really championed, like Atget, it was far more subtle and without an easy answer. If Mortensen had avoided those corny blatantly Freudian paste-up composites, he would have weathered better.

Of course, now in the era where every fourth grader knows how to do composites on a laptop, and there are millions and millions of them out there in cyberspace, even the technical aspect gets to the point of just being taken for granted and boring. Look at what happened to Uelsmann - way more nuanced and seamless, but collapsing prices anyway. History can throw some curve balls.

 

[removed account4]

I was sitting drinking my tea, thinking about whatever drifted thru my view. And about this thread.

I was part of a university photo program for a few decades...as a student, volunteer and then employee...1977 until I retired in 2015. The university is in northern California, just up the coast from the epicenter of 'West Coast Photography'. Just before my time the university had AA up for a talk and I. Cunningham up for a workshop. But thinking back on all the years there, as a student, then helping students, AA was rarely mentioned. He was not held up as a saint of photography...important, yes. The head prof while I was a student knew AA, but he did primarily street and natural light portraits. The senior photo prof during some of my employed years was making work that makes WM's work appear shallow and tame. Thomas Joshua Cooper who taught there while I was a student was influenced by AA, took AA's advice about sticking with 5x7 instead of moving up to 11x14, but TJC did not teach, think, or produce work like AA.

All this to say that I believe many people build up AA in order to knock him down....they claim that others see and worship him as a saint, so that they have a debate point...straw man argument, I believe. Both AA and WM were lucky people. They both had a love of photography as an art form and both were able to shape their lives around this love. They both gave through their teaching abilities and thus also received much back. Both are now dead, both are remembered.

thanks for your POV vaughn ...
maybe its mainly internet-people that make him seem like a saint ? I've seen / read a lot of wacky stuff "online" for years ...
he certainly made photographs that stand the test of time and you can just look at for hours ...

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

Composition? Much of Mortensen's works were conspicuous plays on former painting genre - a self-portrait with a background resembling that in the Mona Lisa, compositions mimicking those of the era of Napoleon III,

That's the divergence of the F64 group. Photography should be "pure", not trying to imitate paintings but be good enough to stand on it's own. That's why I think the hardcore dogma by Ansel Adams practitioners about everything about being sharp and well exposed misses the point. Photography should change for it to grow. When I was an undergrad, and didn't know much about photography, I thought he was a deity. I had teachers that were slaves to sharpness and the zone system. They rejected photo that wasn't all sharp. Sharpness and the craft of the print was the only criteria of good photography. Though I do agree good technique should be used when making and printing a photograph, vision and Adam's pre-visualization is most important.

 

[eddie]

All this to say that I believe many people build up AA in order to knock him down....

That seems to happen often, with photographers who have been well known and successful.

 

[DREW WILEY]

I can remember when my older brother was in a photo academy, and the instructors would sneer if anyone mentioned AA, and contemptuously call him "that rocks and trees guy at the Yosemite gift shop". Everything changes over time. Fame is rather transient. Tastes change. One of the most predictable in terms of stuck in a rut pre-Raphaelite pictorialism was Julia Cameron. But she shines brighter than ever despite the utter collapse on that genre itself due to the sheer beauty of her images, and to some extent, the eminence of her sitters.

The greatest of all the Yosemite photographers, Carleton Watkins, is getting more of the attention he deserves nowadays, and might have eclipsed Adams if most of his work hadn't burned in the 1906 SF earthquake and fire, and most of the remaining big prints have gotten mildewed. Edward Weston wrote an f/64 manifesto condemning everything beforehand; yet I happen to like his earlier pictorial work better. Steichen made a similar transition; and I like his earlier work too.

Change is inevitable. People get tired of the same thing after awhile. And although it's not Mortensen's fault, people of my generation saw just so darn many hokey pseudo-surreal composite paste-up pictures in the 70's, that just about anything along that vein smells like spoiled milk today.

 

[Sirius Glass]

That's the divergence of the F64 group. Photography should be "pure", not trying to imitate paintings but be good enough to stand on it's own. That's why I think the hardcore dogma by Ansel Adams practitioners about everything about being sharp and well exposed misses the point. Photography should change for it to grow. When I was an undergrad, and didn't know much about photography, I thought he was a deity. I had teachers that were slaves to sharpness and the zone system. They rejected photo that wasn't all sharp. Sharpness and the craft of the print was the only criteria of good photography. Though I do agree good technique should be used when making and printing a photograph, vision and Adam's pre-visualization is most important.

F64 was a movement for photography to stand on its own and not be a wannabee painter. Once the noose was taken off the photographer, the photographer was allowed to compose photographs with parts out of focus to improve the composition. Ansel Adams helped set us free, and we were allowed to grow.

 

[removed account4]

F64 was a movement for photography to stand on its own and not be a wannabee painter. Once the noose was taken off the photographer, the photographer was allowed to compose photographs with parts out of focus to improve the composition. Ansel Adams helped set us free, and we were allowed to grow.

always seems to me that people love to exchange one set of chains+shackles for another.
doesn't bother me, im happy people are happy, and even happier people like to make photographs.

 

[DREW WILEY]

AA attributed that shift in thinking to Strand, not to himself. A lot of early f/64 work was almost two-dimensional, obsessed with acute focus everywhere (though certainly not by today's standards, with our far better lenses). But PH Emerson was more the real father of Photography as an art form, and Stieglitz soon thereafter. It was an interesting era, coinciding with vast sea changes in painting itself, and it worked both ways. Painters like Degas were deeply influenced by photography. The American constuctivist, Sheeler, worked in both media.
Carleton Watkins sometimes visualized like a constructivist well before any of them. I really admire the ability to work with open light like Watkins and Muybridge did so well prior to panchromatic films. It gave things like granite monoliths structural form and scale for its own sake. Adams saw light quite differently.

 

[juan]

It’s also possible that AA spent his time photographing and promoting while Mortensen is reputed to have spent his time bedding his models.

 

[Sirius Glass]

It’s also possible that AA spent his time photographing and promoting while Mortensen is reputed to have spent his time bedding his models.

Did Mortensen have to apply and interview for that position?

 

[bluechromis]

That's the divergence of the F64 group. Photography should be "pure", not trying to imitate paintings but be good enough to stand on it's own. That's why I think the hardcore dogma by Ansel Adams practitioners about everything about being sharp and well exposed misses the point. Photography should change for it to grow. When I was an undergrad, and didn't know much about photography, I thought he was a deity. I had teachers that were slaves to sharpness and the zone system. They rejected photo that wasn't all sharp. Sharpness and the craft of the print was the only criteria of good photography. Though I do agree good technique should be used when making and printing a photograph, vision and Adam's pre-visualization is most important.

Agree about photographing needs to change. I think the dominance of the f/64 ideology has limited the evolution of art photography.

 

[138S]

That's why I think the hardcore dogma by Ansel Adams practitioners about everything about being sharp and well exposed misses the point.

IMO "Ansel Admas practitioners" don't have that dogma, some my have it in the old Group f/64 style.

Let's cite a remarkable AA practitioner (J. Sexton):

"I like to tell people, jokingly, at workshops that the ultimate pho-tographic bit of knowledge is just a few words: “I wanted it that way.” Because if somebody asks why is a picture this way, or why did you do that, you can always say, “I wanted it that way.” I always add that if you have to explain too often that, “I wanted it that way,” either there’s something missing in the picture or you ought to want it another way.

You don’t want people always asking you why it’s out of focus or why it’s too dark. Sometimes we have this attachment to the image and a viewer with objectivity can cut right to the core and ask, “why is 90% of this picture irrelevant.”

When we are successful and make a picture that is exciting to others it’s not based just on shutter speeds and f/stops and what sort of tricks you can pull in the dark-room. It’s taking your experience and translating it in a way that is magical."



First may have to consider what Group f/64 was: "Group f/64 or f.64 was a group founded by seven 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (U.S.) viewpoint. In part, they formed in opposition to the pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but moreover, they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.[1]"

GF64 is an style, not a dogma.

"a thesis, giving rise to its reaction; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis."

Pictorialism is the thesis, Group f/64 is (perhaps) an antithesis, and by 1940 we had many Synthesis styles yet...

Most Adam's shots are sharp because it is the common situation in landscape fine art. In portraiture we tend a lot to use defocus as a resource to concentrate attention in the subject while in landscape we tend to show the subject in a context or even we show the context alone. Ambiental portraits are also possible... of course...

It is true that "f/64" was a c. 1930 style wanting all in focus, but AA also praticed photography for the next 50 years.

But IMO it's also true that having all in focus in LF is often a challenge, so probably some LF shots try to show some masterliness from that, still IMO the most valuable yield is obtained by managing focus as a resource, both to have all in focus or to get selective focus(Dovima with elephants , Avedon!), both of advanced nature due to movements.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Pere - please note my latest comments on the parallel thread about AA's frozen lake image. There are just all kinds of misconceptions out there.

 

[138S]

Pere - please note my latest comments on the parallel thread about AA's frozen lake image. There are just all kinds of misconceptions out there.

Yes... agree... I understand it's true that we can consider the "Western (U.S.) viewpoint" in every U.S. cultural stream, but in every place there had been a different reaction to Pictorialism and later a synthesis. But at all we can consider that GF64 is the whole "Western (U.S.) viewpoint"...

Like many cultural streams, GF64 was strong in a certain time and location, and like many others it has been influential after fading.

This is how humans behave, always a group in a new generation is to try to do the opposite to what the previous generation (or generations) did... in that way artists have treasured more explored terrain with time.

 

[DREW WILEY]

The F64 fervor might look big as a turning point in the photo history textbooks, but it was actually very brief. I have an old edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica with an absolutely rabid long article about photography written by Edward Weston at that time, consigning to hell every photograph ever taken beforehand. A fanatical manifesto, really; but one he himself never adhered to, and by definition, one which condemned all his own earlier work, which was outstanding in its own right, and quite possibly his best. A lot of empty noise of the type artists seem to be so good at. All the original members soon branched out.

 

[Sirius Glass]

The F64 fervor might look big as a turning point in the photo history textbooks, but it was actually very brief. I have an old edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica with an absolutely rabid long article about photography written by Edward Weston at that time, consigning to hell every photograph ever taken beforehand. A fanatical manifesto, really; but one he himself never adhered to, and by definition, one which condemned all his own earlier work, which was outstanding in its own right, and quite possibly his best. A lot of empty noise of the type artists seem to be so good at. All the original members soon branched out.

Edward Weston set out to destroy all of his early work including the negatives. Now we have nothing of his studio work in Los Angeles for example.

 

[DREW WILEY]

We have all those Daybook images, etc. His studio portrait work was a career he hated, and never put his heart into it. An authentic EW portrait from his Monterey studio might fetch only a few hundred dollars today. Same with a most of AA's commercial photos. Competent, but that's about it.

 

[Paul Howell]

I think there was more to the AA Mortenson feud that just style, AA developed the Zone system with Fred Archer a well know pictorialist who shot many film stars.

 

[BrianShaw]

We have all those Daybook images, etc. His studio portrait work was a career he hated, and never put his heart into it. An authentic EW portrait from his Monterey studio might fetch only a few hundred dollars today. Same with a most of AA's commercial photos. Competent, but that's about it.

Same as Edward Curtis...