Wynn Bullock and Zone System, as told by Edna Bullock
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Ansel Adams is dead*
.* In case you’re wondering what I mean, look up “Schoenberg is Dead” – an essay Pierre Boulez wrote immediately after the death of Arnold Schoenberg. BTW, Ansel Adams, a pianist, didn't like his music or anything contemporary.
.* In case you’re wondering what I mean, look up “Schoenberg is Dead” – an essay Pierre Boulez wrote immediately after the death of Arnold Schoenberg. BTW, Ansel Adams, a pianist, didn't like his music or anything contemporary.
MattKing
Moderator
As long as one puts most of one's emphasis on the "visualization" (or for Minor White devotees, "pre-visualization") parts of Zone System lore, one can gain lots of benefit from it.
I expect that Wynn Bullock already had that part internalized.
I expect that Wynn Bullock already had that part internalized.
I used to pre-visualize my girlfriends. But they never seemed to live up to my expectations.
Agreed, and already being familiar with the materials, he was already to go...not test.
My light meter rarely comes out until I am well into the visualizing process...usually after the camera is up and the image roughly composed on the GG. In unusual lighting, I might check the meter before setting the camera up to see if the available light (with its related exposure requirements and SBR) will work with what I am visualizing...and in turn, that information influences me in how I approach making the image. Over-laying this are the needs of the processes I plan to use to make the print...fortunately most of that is in the processing stage and not an issue in the field. I just need to keep good notes.
I performed Schoenberg's piano pieces op. 11 ages ago, as well as his wonderful Fantasy for violin and piano. Also briefly worked on Boulez's 3rd piano sonata but didn't go very far with that endeavor.
There are interesting parallels to be made here, not only between Schoenberg's development of the 12-tone technique and Adams' zone system, but also in the increasing depth of experimentation by those who followed them - from Schoenberg and Berg to Boulez and Babbitt for serialism, and, similarly, those who still dive into zone system research years after Adams' death, and, I believe, much deeper than he would have thought possible or even necessary.
Doesn't always make for great photographs? Who cares. Neither does sunny 16 - to wit, the immense amount of phenomenally boring "sunny-sixteen-ed" so-called "street" photographs that one sees on various websites and forums that are without any kind of artistic merit whatsoever (and I include my own in the lot).
I have a few of these "beyond", "way beyond", "extremely beyond", "beyondest" the Zone System. I find them fascinating, have learned from them, and none have incited me to become a zone system monk, elevate a shrine to AA and stop actually going out to shoot stuff.
Thing I don't get is why any conversation about the zone system quickly veers into one about the artistic merits of Adams' photographs (hint: it's not), the zone system itself being some sort of secret Templar (the knights, not Simon) handshake, or having its practitioners' interests being sarcastically dismissed (hint: some of them are actually pretty good photographers). I could understand if you had armies of Zone System Zealots invading forums trying to convert sunny-sixteeners, but that's not the case. There is not cult. It's just another way of looking at what's in front of you.
Yes! That is why I quoted Boulez. I wonder how much Ansel was influenced by serialism. I'm sure he knew Schoneberg's work and his theory of harmony which is very philosophical and opinionated. I played some of Schoneberg's piano pieces. I also orchestrated Webern's variations for piano Op. 27. long time ago. To serialize was a way to industrialize a creative practice, especially if we look at Boulez's total serialism. The creative process becomes less apparent. It also happens in Cage's chance music or Lutoslawski's aleatoricism. The process supersedes artistic intention.
Interestingly enough, what I learnt from Beyond the Zone System is how to use the incident meter. Both Ansel Adams and Wynn Bullock are among my favorite photographers. They were musicians before pursuing photography. I enjoy reading about densitometry, the zone system, etc but from a historical perspective. When it comes to photography, I'm between Boulez and Cage, well, maybe more on the Boulez's side.
Adams stopped playing the piano seriously in the early 20s, at a time when Schoenberg was just developing the compositional technique. After that, twelve-tone music, as well as serialism, weren't widely performed. There was no wide spread dissemination of these ideas, and if you weren't close to academia, you would never hear about them - same way, in fact, that the great majority of people who had a camera never heard of the zone system.
This said, that Adams basic training as a musician had an influence or impact on his development of the zone system is a more than just plausible hypothesis. As I wrote in another thread, he thought of visualization in the manner of a composer: you can hear the piece in your head but it doesn't exist until you've decided the instrumentation, put it down on paper and have it performed (he himself often used that analogy, comparing the negative to the written score). And he does reference the work in the darkroom as "performance", in the sense of "interpreting the score" (i.e., the negative).
Photography and music are two forms of personal expression that actually have much more in common then what we think. Including having people whose interests are singularly, almost obsessively, concerned with the scientific/analytic aspects of them.
I was thinking along the same lines. Far more people know of AA through his prints, his work as an educator, and his work in promoting wilderness, etc. Some people prefer to talk about art rather than make it, some people prefer to explore the technical side of an art form over making art...and many more people should talk more about photography, explore the technical side of the art form, and make incredible prints.
If photography is an artistic expression then there can't be just one way to develop it for everyone. It is like all humanity came out with English as their language, not only unikely but absurd too. Just think in the milliard of different musical genres and styles, but just some of them resonate inside each person. The zone system is a method, nothing else, it could work or not for you (including visualization).
By the way, I knew one guy that make very good B/W night city photography without lightmeter. He estimated exposure and nailed every single time.
By the way, I knew one guy that make very good B/W night city photography without lightmeter. He estimated exposure and nailed every single time.
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As a formally trained musician, I instantly recognized the Zone System as an adaptation of chord analysis. It made a great deal of sense to me. I spent a number of years passing a spot meter over landscapes learning to judge various values and training my eye. Now I generally just take low light and high light level incident meter readings to guide exposure and development. From training my eye, I know what I’ll get.
OP
OP
Deleted member 88956
End wound up making some those famous prints in the darkroom, entirely altering negative he was so "obsessed" getting right? He was a composer all right, wrote the score, then went on stage and improvised the hell out of it. Yes, it takes skill to do that. It also proves a lot of people get hung up on Zone System and end up in all the same mediocrity. All too often the intended message is written between the lines. General understanding though of Zone System is the premise: learn it and your photographs will be better. I don't know if lack of actual visual improvement drives users into more testing, but possibly part of their problem.
Zone System is certainly good to know, at least know what & how it can do it (or says it will). It helps understand processing aspects as well as all the before and after exposure steps. But once it sinks in to imagine precise greatness of the final outcome, the message is lost. Those who know of Ansel Adams as Zone System promoter and then see it as a sure way to make better photographs, have either not read his all, or selectively skipped some quite critical points he made over time, often indirectly. Yet no matter how we value Zone System in itself, it is all too often used with a mechanical precision (testing and more testing will drag users into that) resulting in muddying once vision instead of clearing it up.
In a sense of artistic impact, Zone System has been far for more detrimental than creative. I suppose that is due to inherent implied testing requirements, without ever stating the obvious: "keep it all in perspective, as testing may not make your photography any better"
For all intended purposes technical side of photography is not as complicated as many want to make it. If one can wing it with consistency and with plausible results, instead of beating the crap out of it in a lab, all the better.
OP
OP
Deleted member 88956
I suppose you know anything described as "artistic" falls squarely into subjective territory and everyone is correct?
As for Zone System and its promoters / practitioners: I don't recall a single one who actually admitted it isn't the recipe for greatness (or at least significant improvement). It's not about an invasion of forums/discussions, just about what themseleves they say about it when they do.
It's a good analogy. I'm also reminded of those musicologists who practice Schenkerian analysis or Allen Forte's set theory. It's not without interest, but by viewing the musical score under a microscope they end up forgetting the relationship between that score and the actual interpretation and performance of the music. I did a bit of that stuff at McGill in the early 90s and hated it. I'd feel the same way if someone would tell me the only way to understand photography is to spend endless days with a densitometer.
Exactly. I usually go out with three meters: a spot meter, an incident light meter, and my instincts. I've never gone full zone system because I don't have the time nor the taste for all the experimentation, but, like juan, I've learned a lot from reading some of the stuff, and do try to integrate some of it into my practice, but the spot meter certainly isn't the tool I use most often.
Interestingly enough, I find ideas like "visualization" and "zone placement" most useful with color transparencies. With them, if you haven't learned to meter, you better be ready to waste a lot of money.
But there are so few of them that it doesn't really matter, no? I mean, those who count never went into that direction. Ansel Adams made it pretty clear that it was his way of making photographs, not the only way. And from the little I've read about Minor White as a teacher, he was more about looking, about aesthetics, and some philosophy, than about densitometry.
This is spot on (pun intended). I think people who are curious about Adams and the zone system shouldn't start with the celebrated trilogy, but rather with Examples - The Making of 40 Photographs. Not only do you understand better what he was after as a photographer, but you also understand more clearly that he didn't view the zone system as the perfect system. In Adams' writings there are a lot more of "I should/could have done this", "another way of doing it would have been this", etc., then people think. You also find quite often immense praise for non-zone-system photographers.
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OP
OP
Deleted member 88956
Exactly. It's probably many others who figured they can outdo AA in ZS lecturing, who created misconceptions about it. Many of them claiming how their ZS way is easier, better, and results are sure to follow.
OP
OP
Deleted member 88956
Yet according to that thread leading transcript, Adams didn't think so. Seems like Bullock himself figured it was not giving him any help he had probably never needed in the first place.
MurrayMinchin
Membership Council
I think the zone system gets its bad rap from the glassy eyed devotion of people in the early stages of learning it and who aren't comfortable enough yet to drop the, "When one does this, you must do that".
I found it to be a quick and solid base to build from. Like others have said, the print is everything. The zone system gave me a good shot at making the print I had in my head, and enough wiggle room around that for variations on what my initial goal was.
There are many paths and none are easy...you have to earn it.
I found it to be a quick and solid base to build from. Like others have said, the print is everything. The zone system gave me a good shot at making the print I had in my head, and enough wiggle room around that for variations on what my initial goal was.
There are many paths and none are easy...you have to earn it.
OP
OP
Deleted member 88956
@MurrayMinchin always keep in mind though that thread was actually about reasons for some not being able to get out of the never ending testing. Zone System, as you also stated, can be of significant importance in one's development, so long as it's properly applied. The testing part has sadly become the face of Zone System, yet one could use its core principles without a single test run, or at most few very basic ones.
Totally right. There are two things they failed to understand about Ansel Adams. First was that he did not consider himself a forward-looking, visionary and revolutionary artist, but, to the contrary, part of a tradition that dates back to the late-19th Century, that of both landscape photographers and painters, more specifically, people like the painter Thomas Moran of the Hudson River School, and the photographer William Henry Jackson, whose respective works, not coincidentally, were instrumental in convincing the U.S. Congress in making Yellowstone a National Park.
Second thing is that the zone system was in good part developed in order to palliate the difficulties related to capturing the wide tonal range of these types of "majestic" landscape, i.e., rendering the shadow and/or highlight detail that Adams could see missing in the landscape photographs of his predecessors. The idea of rendering shadow and highlight detail was not a technical one, but an aesthetic and philosophical one (becoming spiritual with Minor White): to bear witness of the full richness of nature's beauty (I'm oversimplifying). Had Adams done the same work Walker Evans was doing in the 30s, he would never have come up with the zone system because no technique of the sort would have seemed necessary to him. The development of the zone system is purely contextual, and trying to adapt it to every single photographic practice is nonsensical.
Why do you have to see what's in the shadows?
BINGO!!
Not sure I follow your question. Nobody said you have to. I just wrote that the zone system was developed in order to do so in the context - historical and aesthetic - of landscape photography in the first half of the 20th century. But if you read Adams, you see that he doesn't make it an obligation, and that it all depends on how you "visualize" the scene and how you want to interpret it.
It's all about aesthetic choice. You can go from W. Eugene Smith Caravaggio-inspired pieces in which there is absolutely no shadow detail to Robert Adams' western landscapes in which all is seen, and see that all that lies in between is possible.
Zone System has/had two angles.
One has to do with exposure and processing and the other has to do with PREVISUALIZATION to which side Minor White seemed especially devoted. I think Minor was equally technically skilled and I think his students have accomplished more artistically than Ansel's.
I doubt Minor made as many mistakes as AA but he didn't make as much money. Compare Minor's portraits to Ansel's.
One has to do with exposure and processing and the other has to do with PREVISUALIZATION to which side Minor White seemed especially devoted. I think Minor was equally technically skilled and I think his students have accomplished more artistically than Ansel's.
I doubt Minor made as many mistakes as AA but he didn't make as much money. Compare Minor's portraits to Ansel's.
You don't have to and you wouldn't be able to if you have not captured the shadow details.
As an experiment, take any of the well-known works of Ansel Adams from the web. With the help of an image editor, manipulate the image to show no shadow detail. Compare this version with the original and ask yourself whether the shadow details make any difference.
There are many of Ansel Adams photos where Shadows are completely black. It depends upon arsthetics. We shouldn't just do a knee-jerk reaction to provide Shadow detail unless it really make sense to provide it.
Remember that black highlights the rest of the photograph and is often aesthetically pleasing. It brings out the details elsewhere. I think you see a big problem in digital photography where the cameras can provide 13 stops. The photographer's think that is necessary to provide detail in the shadows. All that does is flatten contrast and make the picture boring.
Plus most people don't care what's in the shadows. The eye goes to the highlights. At most you may want to see some form in the shadow just to know that something is there. But not really see exactly what it is.
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