A well written and accurate summation of Man Ray and Mortensen in that order.
Why do you think Ansel Adams is better known than William Mortensen?
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A well written and accurate summation of Man Ray and Mortensen in that order.
Just last year, one of Man Ray's photographs, Le Violon, set the record price for a photograph at auction, eclipsing Edvard Steichen, Andreas Gersky, Jeff Wall, and Cindy Sherman. Mortensen is further down the list.
I am a big fan of good pictorialism.
Does any good pictorialism actually exist or is it just a logical place left as an eternally null set? "good pictorialism" is an oxymoron.
Steichen's The Flatiron and The Pond - Moonlight, to cite just two well known examples, are generally considered good Pictorialist photographs. People have liked them enough to pay millions of dollars for them. I also like, for example, Alvin Langdon Coburn's The Octopus, Gertrude Käsebier's Blessed Art Thou, and Frank Eugene's Lady with String of Pearls. Alas, no witches.
When taking photographs, sometimes accidents happen. #454 still stands. Photograph was never meant to replace everything that a paint brush could do; photography is its own media with its own forms and styles.
Oh come now! Just take something obvious like early Steichen.
He was insanely talented.
You can probably discuss whether he brought pictorial art as such much forward, or if some of his work bordered on pandering kitsch.
But you can’t discuss whether the majority of his work was essentially beautiful and had appeal.
And he always brought something extra, something special to his work.
It was never obvious or naive.
He also brought darkroom work forward by leaps and bounds. Both in kinds of techniques and degree of excellence.
Just take this, incidentally the second most expensive photograph ever sold.
Mortensen in comparison was just incompetent and way too late to the party.
He was not the unsung and repressed genius some people are trying to make him into.
The photographs I referred to were not accidents. I certainly didn’t expect you to change your mind though.
Your last too line ring true:
Mortensen in comparison was just incompetent and way too late to the party.
He was not the unsung and repressed genius some people are trying to make him into.
I meant that some pictorialist photographs were accidentally good.
That is nonsense, but expected.
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It’s a good thing that Mortensen really couldn’t care less about what people think of him and his works.
What else did you expect?
I love that shot and I'm a pictorial fan. They're "artistic."
The odious one.
MattKing
Moderator
The earliest recorded use of this phrase appears to be by John Lydgate in his Debate between the horse, goose, and sheep, circa 1440
Shakespeare, in Much Ado About Nothing, has Dogberry say "comparisons are odorous" - which may have been irony.
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