Gee, you missed the sarcasm.
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.
I didn't necessarily mean right now .. people have been using his tripod holes and preaching his ghospel for a long timeJohn, people are not turning Ansel Adams into a deity, he has been a deity for many decades.
WM On the Negative is one of the few great works on the subject, and different at that too.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..
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.
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.
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.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 seems to happen often, with photographers who have been well known and successful.All this to say that I believe many people build up AA in order to knock him down....
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.
It’s also possible that AA spent his time photographing and promoting while Mortensen is reputed to have spent his time bedding his models.
Agree about photographing needs to change. I think the dominance of the f/64 ideology has limited the evolution of art photography.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.
That's why I think the hardcore dogma by Ansel Adams practitioners about everything about being sharp and well exposed misses the point.
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.
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.
Same as Edward Curtis...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.
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