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

Alan Johnson · Jan 27, 2021

Ads in Camera Craft 1941 called Mortensen "Photography's leading author and photographer"
That same year they published "Mortensen on the Negative" which advocates developing everything to gamma infinity.
The ad for this says it contains "..everything there is to be known on how to make perfect negatives" (p570):
https://archive.org/details/cameracra484919411942phot/page/570/mode/2up
This must have well pleased the f64 group from 1932 and their followers.

Paul Howell · Jan 27, 2021

AA must have turned in his grave when the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography added Mortensen's negatives to it's collection.

DREW WILEY · Jan 27, 2021

Brian - Yes, Curtis is someone I would like to have mentioned myself. If you want a classic gravure print of some especially famous Indian scene, you might have to drop a couple of hundred thousand dollars, even though he staged most of those, and often in generic costumes. But later in life when working in Hollywood, he wanted to become a real art photographer, and dabbled in a number of pictorial images appropriate to the artsy photo genre of that time. I've seen those kinds of original Curtis prints for sale as low as ten bucks apiece at antique book fairs.

Helge · Jan 27, 2021

I’d love to read the exchanges between Ansel and Mortensen.
Anyone know where to find them?

DREW WILEY · Jan 27, 2021

They might be censored.

Alan Johnson · Jan 27, 2021

Mortensen already wrote a lot in Camera Craft by 1934 when Adams started to explain the f64 group, eg in letters on p 183 and p297 of the magazine (not the archive page nos).
https://archive.org/details/cameracraft411934phot/page/n206/mode/1up
They both continued to write for Camera Craft till 1942 when the magazine merged with American Photography which does not appear to be archived.
https://archive.org/details/cameracra484919411942phot/page/170/mode/2up
The archived Camera Craft is here, but not in sequence:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=camera+craft&and[]=creator:"photographers'+association+of+california"
I too would be interested to learn of any other debates they had (that are written down, not hearsay).

Helge · Jan 27, 2021

Alan Johnson said:
Mortensen already wrote a lot in Camera Craft by 1934 when Adams started to explain the f64 group, eg in letters on p 183 and p297 of the magazine (not the archive page nos).
https://archive.org/details/cameracraft411934phot/page/n206/mode/1up
They both continued to write for Camera Craft till 1942 when the magazine merged with American Photography which does not appear to be archived.
https://archive.org/details/cameracra484919411942phot/page/170/mode/2up
The archived Camera Craft is here, but not in sequence:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=camera+craft&and[]=creator:"photographers'+association+of+california"
I too would be interested to learn of any other debates they had (that are written down, not hearsay).

Thanks a lot! It’s a start.
Ansel oozes insincerity through every line as far as I can see.

DREW WILEY · Jan 27, 2021

Posturing. It seems to have been ubiquitous in art pontification journals back then. Now the critics spend a lot of effort digging up the most arcane terms they can find in the dictionary, used nowhere else than in convoluted art-speak rivalries.

removed account4 · Jan 27, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
Posturing. It seems to have been ubiquitous in art pontification journals back then. Now the critics spend a lot of effort digging up the most arcane terms they can find in the dictionary, used nowhere else than in convoluted art-speak rivalries.

SSDD
its all posturing and all nonsense and buzzwords used by the "tastemakers". .. and these days the tastemakers are made algorithms that also give people their 15seconds of fame. and the fame seems to be even more intoxicating today than it was in years gone by ( instant dopamine hit), I mean Mortensen didn't go to the publishers office ( or the f64 hideout ) with a firearm to shoot the place up and then turn the weapon on himself like the people who are no longer famous via utoob after he was dragged in the mud ...

DREW WILEY · Jan 27, 2021

Oh, artists have always had some hotheads. Recall the sloppy unsuccessful sword duel between two of the great early Impressionists, when they got into a heated stylistic table argument, both drunken on absinthe. Carravagio murdered a man, and had to flee the city. Charles Manson's cult murder victims were selected because they had cut short his career hopes as a musician.

Alan Johnson · Jan 27, 2021

There was a technical dispute as well.
After "Mortensen on the negative" (post 101) was published in 1941 it took Adams seven years till "Basic Photo 2 The Negative " 1948.

DREW WILEY · Jan 27, 2021

Ho hum. I gave away all my AA how-to books, except Examples. Got well beyond his methodology a long time ago. But it was a valuable practical sort of contribution in its time.

alanrockwood · Jan 27, 2021

OK, I got curious and looked up William Mortensen. I guess I should be a cheerleader for a local boy who made good, but honestly, from what I saw of his work it's not exactly my cup of tea. Other people might like it.

Helge · Jan 28, 2021

alanrockwood said:
OK, I got curious and looked up William Mortensen. I guess I should be a cheerleader for a local boy who made good, but honestly, from what I saw of his work it's not exactly my cup of tea. Other people might like it.

No, absolutely Mortensen was terribly cliched and unimaginative, and Ansel the better artist (how much better could be debated though).

Within the school of pictorialism there were many who where far better in every sense.
He was lucky with connections and geography. And had the right weighting of pseudo provocative while still being palatable.

Ansel was basically just a crypto nineteenth century landscape painter. Trying to distance himself with words from something he certainly was.

DREW WILEY · Jan 28, 2021

Disagree. I grew up in that very part of the world where AA took many of his most famous shots. I think I can be objective because I was on my own feet as a photographer before I ever even saw a real print of his. But he had an incredibly poetic sensitivity to natural light, possibly difficult to appreciate until you have deeply experienced that same light yourself, and know the distinction between how he rendered it and that vast herd of clones or wannabees of mere technique who didn't. VERY VERY VERY LITTLE resemblance to the landscape painters either before or during his own era. Where do you get that ridiculous myth? That kind of category did exist, but it certainly didn't include him. Even the earliest landscape shots by AA that Steiglitz took notice of did not bear that character.

Besides, the landscape painters were colorists, and some were themselves remarkably good. Most had a far better understanding of color itself than 99% of career color photographers do.

Helge · Jan 28, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
Disagree. I grew up in that very part of the world where AA took many of his most famous shots. I think I can be objective because I was on my own feet as a photographer before I ever even saw a real print of his. But he had an incredibly poetic sensitivity to natural light, possibly difficult to appreciate until you have deeply experienced that same light yourself, and know the distinction between how he rendered it and that vast herd of clones or wannabees of mere technique who didn't. VERY VERY VERY LITTLE resemblance to the landscape painters either before or during his own era. Where do you get that ridiculous myth? That kind of category did exist, but it certainly didn't include him. Even the earliest landscape shots by AA that Steiglitz took notice of did not bear that character.

Besides, the landscape painters were colorists, and some were themselves remarkably good. Most had a far better understanding of color itself than 99% of career color photographers do.

Using cabs and using the same adverb three times in a row doesn’t make an argument.

His compositions, his tonal relationships, and of course his subjects are very much grounded in the history of painting and especially nineteenth century landscape.
Is it one to one identical in style (if that was possible)? No, of course not. How could it be, with the completely different set of tools and time?
But his work is clearly in the same family.

I’ve read quite a bit of and about Ansel, and nowhere does he’s explicitly deny or address this quite straightforward observation.
I’m not the only one to see this, I might add.

Arthurwg · Jan 28, 2021

Sirius Glass said:
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.

One of my favorite book about EW is "Edward Weston: The Early Years," by Karen Haas. Details his time in LA and his relationship with Margrethe Mather, his girlfriend at the time, also a photographer, who apparently set EW on the path that lead to his success. She was quite a character.

Arthurwg · Jan 28, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
Ho hum. I gave away all my AA how-to books, except Examples. Got well beyond his methodology a long time ago. But it was a valuable practical sort of contribution in its time.

Yes. I love that book. Very instructive. And BTW, I happen to have three WM books that I would be willing to sell if someone twisted my arm.

BrianShaw · Jan 28, 2021

How much?

DREW WILEY · Jan 28, 2021

Helge - Again, where do you come up with that idea? Yeah, I know that disparaging critics enjoy lumping AA into the Romanticist school, or compare his work to Bierstadt's paintings. But that's because they're trying to be taxonomists while sitting in city offices. How much of of the scope of his work have you actually seen? Just books?

cowanw · Jan 28, 2021

Well, from the Ansel Adams Gallery for one:
"Inevitably, Adams has been compared to the landscape photographers of the nineteenth century, William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan, as well as nineteenth century painters of the sublime landscape, such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt. It might be argued that Adams is one of the last in the Romantic tradition."

DREW WILEY · Jan 28, 2021

That's gallery marketing nonsense. I've encountered all kinds of informational errors down that avenue, even one just a couple days ago that directly contradicted his own published words about a certain well-known image. I doubt AA himself wouid have appreciated these kinds of assessments. Back in his own time, a lot of commercial photographers used the put down, "that rocks and trees guy in Yosemite". Equally inappropriate. AA made most of his living as a commercial photographer himself. Get better informed, or you're just recycling old silly stereotypes, and trying to file everything into the same stale generic pigeonholes for lack of a better way of actually explaining things. Or else show me a single instance of analogous imagery to Bierstadt or O'Sullivan, or even between O'Sullivan the photographer and Bierstsadt the painter.
Yes, they all did notable work outdoors in the West. Does that make them all the same. Or does it make every individual who ever used a camera in a big city like New York a "non-romantic street photographer" by contrast, if the whole world needs to fit into a discrete number of little labeled bins in order to make sense? What a pathetic poverty of vocabulary!

Wayne · Jan 29, 2021

Domes of the Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt

Vaughn · Jan 29, 2021

How come painters always seem to be at the right place at the right time to get the best light?

semi-satire alert

halfaman · Jan 29, 2021

Wayne said:
Domes of the Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt

Below the B/W version. I must say that it doesn't remind me AA at all...

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

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