Wynn Bullock and Zone System, as told by Edna Bullock

Alex Benjamin · Dec 23, 2021

Raghu Kuvempunagar said:
You don't have to and you wouldn't be able to if you have not captured the shadow details.

This.

If you feel your photo looks better without shadow detail, you can always darken the shadows in the darkroom. If you feel it looks better with shadow (or highlight) detail and you don't have them on the negative, nothing much you can do.

Reminds me of this quote from an interview I was just reading with the great Magnum printer Pablo Inirio: "I’d rather have a negative that’s over-exposed than under-exposed. Under-exposed is hard because you want to bring out as much detail as you can—if you feel it’s necessary to the picture—and that’s hard to do without going grey. So when that happens, you end up working on a higher-grade paper with more black and white, which means less grey but you lose in the highlights, or you have to spend a lot more time printing for the highlights. So that’s hard. Whereas if it’s overexposed, I can always just add more time."

The "if you feel it's necessary to the picture" is the most important part of that quote.

To come back to the OP, yeah, a lot of zone system practitioners have gone way overboard on the scientific side of things. That said, the "don't worry about exposure and metering modern black and white film has so much latitude you can over- or under-expose by 1 or 2 stops it won't make a difference" that I've ran into more and more often lately, I find no better.

Raghu Kuvempunagar · Dec 23, 2021

Alan Edward Klein said:
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.

Ansel didn't begin his photography with a 13 stops digital camera. I think Ansel knew when exactly to include shadow details in his works. Similarly all good photographers. Blanket rejection of shadow details is as facile as the obsession to retain shadow details. It's an aesthetic choice, not a dogma.

Mike Lopez · Dec 23, 2021

Alan Edward Klein said:
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.

I suspect you've been looking at poor reproductions online. Adams spent quite a bit of time railing against the "chalk and soot" nature of photographs that don't maintain detail, or, at a minimum, texture, in both the highlights and the shadows. If you read his descriptions of how he made many of his photographs, you'll see that he would take pains to put the darkest parts of the image on zone 3 (perhaps zone 2 if he was feeling bold), and then develop for the highlights. It became such a scientific approach for him that one could argue his artistic vision ceased and he became almost purely formulaic. Perhaps you can identify some of the "many" Adams photographs with complete blackness?

MattKing · Dec 23, 2021

Alan Edward Klein said:
It depends upon arsthetics.

Alex Benjamin · Dec 23, 2021

Alan Edward Klein said:
most people don't care what's in the shadows.

That's simply not true. It's not what people care about that's meaningful, it's what the photographer decides to show. Again, same extremes as before: in W. Eugene Smith photos, people can't care about what's in the shadows because he decides not to show any there - the point is to show very little, or what he considers essential (another great master of this is Alex Webb) ; with Robert Adams, the point is to show everything, so the whole photograph is in the upper register of the tonal range. There is little, if any, black in them. The idea that it's needed to "highlight the rest of the photograph" is true at times but not an aesthetic necessity.

Mike Lopez · Dec 23, 2021

Alex Benjamin said:
That's simply not true. It's not what people care about that's meaningful, it's what the photographer decides to show. Again, same extremes as before: in W. Eugene Smith photos, people can't care about what's in the shadows because he decides not to show any there - the point is to show very little, or what he considers essential (another great master of this is Alex Webb) ; with Robert Adams, the point is to show everything, so the whole photograph is in the upper register of the tonal range. There is little, if any, black in them. The idea that it's needed to "highlight the rest of the photograph" is true at times but not an aesthetic necessity.

Agree. There were lots of statements in Alan's post that perhaps apply to him, but hardly to "most people." I would also take exception to the statements about the eye going to the highlights and how details in the shadows make the photograph boring and with flat contrast. These are all statements of Alan's personal preferences, and should not be taken as facts.

DMJ · Dec 23, 2021

juan said:
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.

I taught musical analysis at the undergraduate and graduate level. In addition to the regular tools we have, I used Schenker for some works that could be explained better with such a level of abstraction. It does not work for everything. Traditional harmonic analysis, Schenkerian analysis are tools for analysis of a work but not tools for composing music. I see the different scales and modes (tonality) more of an analogy. Having perfect pitch would be the equivalent to someone's perfect 18% grey. Musicians do a lot of training to be able to recognize scales and chords at the point we are able to write on paper what we hear. Thus I think of the Zone System of a great pedagogical tool to learn tonality. The 11 steps scale modulated by a curve would give the photographer a unique tonality to the photograph, its unique "mode".

If we use Messiaen's modes to compose music, we will sound like Messiaen and no one will care about our music. The same can be said about serialism, we don't want to sound like Boulez, Schoenberg, Berg or Weber, to mention a few. It is very easy to recognize (for trained musicians) the tone rows upon hearing the music. For the same reason, I don't want to see images that look like AA's work. Not long ago I did a workshop at Yosemite and saw serious photographers using their phones to take pictures. Today we have different tools that give us different opportunities to create unique work.

BTW: The use of spectral analysis for composing music (french "spectralism") which was inspired by the use of electronic devices to create music (Elektronische Musik) and made possible by the ability to analyze sound with the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a process where a tool for analysis is used to composed music.

Alex Benjamin · Dec 23, 2021

jtk said:
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.

Minor White is a fascinating figure that isn't mentioned or discussed often enough. Like others mentioned by the OP, he dove deep into zone system analysis and experimentation, but what seems to put people off, or at least make him hard to figure out, is the fact he considered photography essentially a profoundly spiritual endeavor.

Alex Benjamin · Dec 23, 2021

DMJ said:
I taught musical analysis at the undergraduate and graduate level. In addition to the regular tools we have, I used Schenker for some works that could be explained better with such a level of abstraction. It does not work for everything. Traditional harmonic analysis, Schenkerian analysis are tools for analysis of a work but not tools for composing music. I see the different scales and modes (tonality) more of an analogy. Having perfect pitch would be the equivalent to someone's perfect 18% grey. Musicians do a lot of training to be able to recognize scales and chords at the point we are able to write on paper what we hear. Thus I think of the Zone System of a great pedagogical tool to learn tonality. The 11 steps scale modulated by a curve would give the photographer a unique tonality to the photograph, its unique "mode".

If we use Messiaen's modes to compose music, we will sound like Messiaen and no one will care about our music. The same can be said about serialism, we don't want to sound like Boulez, Schoenberg, Berg or Weber, to mention a few. It is very easy to recognize (for trained musicians) the tone rows upon hearing the music. For the same reason, I don't want to see images that look like AA's work. Not long ago I did a workshop at Yosemite and saw serious photographers using their phones to take pictures. Today we have different tools that give us different opportunities to create unique work.

BTW: The use of spectral analysis for composing music (french "spectralism") which was inspired by the use of electronic devices to create music (Elektronische Musik) and made possible by the ability to analyze sound with the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a process where a tool for analysis is used to composed music.

What's interesting from a cultural point of view is that, contrary to serialism, the zone system - and what we could call "extreme zone system analysis" - seems to have been a strictly American phenomenon. I may be wrong about this, and I would appreciate if European members would correct me if I am, but I don't recall seing that much written about the zone system in France, Germany, England or other countries in Europe.

Maybe it's the influence of the Second World War and the closeness to other, more localized conflicts in Europe and later Asia, but photojournalism - in which the zone system is all but useless - seems to have taken precedence over landscape photography on that side of the Atlantic.

Vaughn · Dec 23, 2021

The technical basis behind the Zone System is nice to understand when trying to figure out what the heck went wrong -- and where to go from there.

Viewers care deeply about shadows -- whether they know it or not. At night we fill the shadow with light for safety. Why are lawns so popular in the USA -- safety. We feel more secure in the open than with things animals and enemies can hide behind, including darkness.

Do you want to create tension in your image -- having detailless shadow areas can help.

Deleted member 88956 · Dec 23, 2021

Regarding shadows I'll just say expose as best possible, use (or not) ZS principles if you like, and then it is easier to make the call in the darkroom (I prefer dodging vs. burning). At times it is just clear details in all other areas are critically important, shadows not, and measured range does not cover it all, or makes processing go beyond norm affecting negative too much, then skip that detail.

cowanw · Dec 23, 2021

Alex Benjamin said:
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.

This rather ignores the context of Fred Archer, one of the great pictorialist portrait photographers of the Southern California Salon.

Deleted member 88956 · Dec 23, 2021

cowanw said:
This rather ignores the context of Fred Archer, one of the great pictorialist portrait photographers of the Southern California Salon.

Would you mid expanding on this? You seem to be making a point, but no details. I can't just go through Fred Archer's life story to figure the connection.

jtk · Dec 23, 2021

"Previsualization" is use of a difficult acquired (practiced) skill to identify numbered tones and produce specifically them accurately in a print.

It's not surprising that people who have never seriously tried to develop that difficult skill or have been unable even to read about it by popular writers ...who almost by definition do not understand what it is.

I don't think any writer in any popular photo magazine has ever written usefully about it. Asks for too much from most photographers. Hard to practice with roll film.

Personally I found it was very difficult (like learning French,).. my passion shifted to mastering Ektachrome E4 but I did learn usefully about Zone System before that shift.

DREW WILEY · Dec 23, 2021

Wynn was a contact printer using slow chloride papers like Azo specifically. He did a lot of work in his own area, and probably approached exposure through sheer trial and error familiarity, just like EW and BWE did. I dunked my spotmeter a couple of times in high-altitude snowmelt, accidentally dropping it, and managed the rest of each trip getting perfectly accurate chrome exposures through sheer memory alone, having taken analogous lighting shots many times before.

But with 8x10 color neg film running around thirty dollars every time you pop the shutter today, I have no intention of going around without an accurate meter. Even a premium b&w film like TMY400 is now running ten bucks a shot for 8x10; and at even 1/4 that price in 4X5, it still adds up fast. But even with affordable roll film, walking up to 100 miles in rain and snow with a heavy pack at 70 yrs of age for some special shots, well, I sure want some meter assurance there too, cause I'll never have the same opportunity again. And in the oft extreme contrast scenarios of high mountains and desert, knowing where to precisely place your shadow values is half the battle. You can't dodge into existence in the darkroom something that's not there on the film itself to begin with.

Zone System theory, in its various renditions, is really supplementary. I initiated myself into it at one time, but left it in the rear view mirror some time back, ironically because I didn't find it precise enough. But ZS theory and jargon is still useful as a common denominator language on forums like this one.

I don't know why Michael ridiculed Minor White. Anyone who looked and spoke exactly like the wacky professor in the old movie, Back to the Future, must have had something going for him. But he would have probably made compelling prints if he had never even heard of the Zone System, let alone become its officiating High Priest, examining the entrails of an owl before each lecture session. ... It's just a darn exposure model, for heaven's sake - not a religion!

Alex Benjamin · Dec 23, 2021

cowanw said:
This rather ignores the context of Fred Archer, one of the great pictorialist portrait photographers of the Southern California Salon.

You're absolutely correct. Credit should always be given to Archer as co-creator of the zs.

Deleted member 88956 · Dec 23, 2021

Alex Benjamin said:
You're absolutely correct. Credit should always be given to Archer as co-creator of the zs.

With all the AA and ZS references (with some Minor White in the mix) I never figured someone would put a word in for Archer. I did not miss him from your post at the time as it did not seem all that important. But yeah, credit needs to be given where it belongs, no shortchanging. Still completely inconsequential for this discussion.

Sirius Glass · Dec 23, 2021

I do not like the endless exhaustive testing of the Zome System. but I like what it can do. I studied it and asked a lot of smart people questions until I could narrow the exposure portion to using a spot meter to measure the light reading of the darkest detail I want, put it in the zone I want and adjust the exposure. I can live with that and use that. I have been a happy camper ever since.

Vaughn · Dec 23, 2021

Sirius Glass said:
I do not like the endless exhaustive testing of the Zome System. but I like what it can do. ....

I think there are far less Zonies in the world now -- many of them switched to digital and have taken the alt photo world by storm. Constant testing and recalibrating is the name of that game! Endless opportunities for excuses to not getting around to making many prints.
And it has been great for workshop instructors. The instructor provides the imaging actions to process the student's file, prints up the digital neg, then the student follows the cookbook of the process...bingo, a print with good tonality, etc. Easy peasy. Of course teachers mightl follow up with, "Why did you make that decision? Where do you want to go with this?" and so on.
But who needs Zones when ya got Layers?

My usage of the Zone System echoes yours. Making prints tend to be my testing.

Alex Benjamin · Dec 23, 2021

VTLD said:
With all the AA and ZS references (with some Minor White in the mix) I never figured someone would put a word in for Archer. I did not miss him from your post at the time as it did not seem all that important. But yeah, credit needs to be given where it belongs, no shortchanging. Still completely inconsequential for this discussion.

Not totally inconsequential. Found the quote I've been looking for all day, in Adams' autobiography: "With the cooperation of Fred Archer, instructor in photographic portraiture, I set out to plan a way by which the students would first learn their 'scales and chords' to achieve technical command of the medium. It took several weeks in refinement before I could teach it to students. I called my codification of practical sensitometry the zone system."

The link with music, again, is interesting - this comes just after a passage in which he talks about his piano teachers.

Another interesting fact is that while the zone system itself wasn't fully conceived until the late 30s, he puts at the core of it the concept of visualization and states that he first conceived of it (or experienced it) in 1927 : "I had my first experience with visualization with Monolith, The face of Half Dome in 1927. The concept of visualization became fully formed along with the planning of the zone system about a decade later. In fact, it was clear to me by 1939 that the zone system had little meaning without visualization ; without, in other words, having an image goal in terms of particulal values..."

Regarding Fred Archer, there is desperately little to be found about him, which is quite regrettable.

Deleted member 88956 · Dec 23, 2021

Alex Benjamin said:
Not totally inconsequential. Found the quote I've been looking for all day, in Adams' autobiography: "With the cooperation of Fred Archer, instructor in photographic portraiture, I set out to plan a way by which the students would first learn their 'scales and chords' to achieve technical command of the medium. It took several weeks in refinement before I could teach it to students. I called my codification of practical sensitometry the zone system."

The link with music, again, is interesting - this comes just after a passage in which he talks about his piano teachers.

Another interesting fact is that while the zone system itself wasn't fully conceived until the late 30s, he puts at the core of it the concept of visualization and states that he first conceived of it (or experienced it) in 1927 : "I had my first experience with visualization with Monolith, The face of Half Dome in 1927. The concept of visualization became fully formed along with the planning of the zone system about a decade later. In fact, it was clear to me by 1939 that the zone system had little meaning without visualization ; without, in other words, having an image goal in terms of particulal values..."

Regarding Fred Archer, there is desperately little to be found about him, which is quite regrettable.

I probably phrased it wrong. All I meant by " inconsequential" was as it applies to this thread (not really being a Zone System Q&A even if seems that way at times). But Archer unquestionably deserves credit, although his name is mentioned more than what he actually did.

DMJ · Dec 23, 2021

Great post #74 @Alex Benjamin !

Sirius Glass · Dec 23, 2021

Vaughn said:
I think there are far less Zonies in the world now -- many of them switched to digital and have taken the alt photo world by storm. Constant testing and recalibrating is the name of that game! Endless opportunities for excuses to not getting around to making many prints.
And it has been great for workshop instructors. The instructor provides the imaging actions to process the student's file, prints up the digital neg, then the student follows the cookbook of the process...bingo, a print with good tonality, etc. Easy peasy. Of course teachers mightl follow up with, "Why did you make that decision? Where do you want to go with this?" and so on.
But who needs Zones when ya got Layers?

My usage of the Zone System echoes yours. Making prints tend to be my testing.

I could feel sorry for them.

cowanw · Dec 23, 2021

VTLD said:
Would you mid expanding on this? You seem to be making a point, but no details. I can't just go through Fred Archer's life story to figure the connection.

"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."

I was responding to the suggestion that the Zone System was developed within in the context of Western American landscape photography, exclusive of other areas of photography. This seemed to me to exclude the role that the system might be equally spawned in the mind of a Pictorial portrait Photographer. Which is really to say that sensitometry, in all it's various formulations, is applicable to all forms of photography.

DREW WILEY · Dec 23, 2021

A lot of mythology in this thread, much of it concerning AA. Many of his iconic images were taken back when film quality control was quite inferior compared to now. One had to allow a sufficiently flexible enough exposure and development regimen to accommodate for that risk. And as far as pure blacks in his prints, well, he seldom did that in a graphic sense like Brett Weston did. In fact, some of his ink black skies contained numerous defects needing to be fully blackened out, or in the case of that famous / infamous Lone Pine image, he physically erased (abraded away) the white dolomite rock LONEPINE lettering on the hill behind the high school on the negative, and hid the alteration by blackening out most of the whole hill. Meters of that era weren't are sophisticated as later spotmeters either. VC papers were barely around, and not all that good. Lots of reasons.

And there is no one Zone System per se, with any one guru holding the patent. It's a plastic concept you tailor to your own needs; and this can lead to a multitude of potential Zone systems if necessary. I just down bother going down that rabbit hole because actual sensitometry isn't based upon slicing the curve into this or that many separate segments, but upon recognizing the implications of complete respective curves. After awhile, it all gets intuitive anyway, or else you'll miss the shot futzing around with theory while the light changes.

Wynn Bullock and Zone System, as told by Edna Bullock

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