"What you've got are not photographers....

[250swb]

Is Adams stance on the FSA simply because photography was no longer expected to stand alone to make a statement, but was allied to illustrating reports, poems, propaganda and literature? The FSA was a multi dimensional organisation that (in a minor role at the time) brought skilled artists together in order to communicate a message. This wasn't devoid of intellectualism (Walker Evans flowered as a photographer), but there was expected to be some cross fertilisation and analysis by outsiders of the arts, rather than (conventionally) from within the arts. Maybe Adams ire was simply that he wasn't a team player?

Steve

 

[shadowfox]

"The world is falling apart and Ansel Adams is out photographing rocks!" H.C.B, circa 1939.

How about the sets of hand-printed (with consistent high quality) 16x20 masterpieces from an 8x10 view camera produced by HCB.

What do you think of those?

 

[jljohn]

AA's quote was silly. So was the one I made up. Sure, this is reheating an argument of 60-70 years ago, and the world has moved on. I think Jamie123 summed it up perfectly as (I paraphrase) "Anyone is a _______ with a camera." But the arguments it has sparked are intriguing. I recall that at Arles a couple of years ago, someone reviewed Charlie's portfolio wwith "This is not photography." Also nonsense, of course. I'm just intrigued as to what different people think 'is' or 'isn't' photography.

Cheers,

R.

Roger,

No disrespect intended, but our (collective) jump to declaring such claims as "silly" is interesting to me. From the outset, we have a clear choice, don't we? Either every photograph, no matter the quality, content, context, subject, intent, medium, or creator, is "photography" and its maker is a photographer, or we have to start drawing lines around "photography" and "photographer." I could be said that Ansel was a conservationist with a camera, so I doubt he saw intent as the distinction between photography and non-photography. He used 35mm, MF, LF, so medium was not the distinction. Knowing what we know about Ansel, my guess is that he felt that one had to have a certain technical capability (and exercise that capability in the course of making photographs) to be a photographer and hence to engage in photography. He also seemed to care that the photographer created fine prints (not just negatives that were passed off to others to handle). We may disagree with his line-drawing, but I would hesitate to call it silly, unless of course you believe that anyone who presses a shutter button is a "photographer." The lines are not clear in my mind, but I think there are distinctions between a "shutter-presser" and a "photographer." Don't you?

 

[Chris101]

Adams' Manzanar photographs look like his Napa Valley photographs. People living and working, and everyone is happy, happy, happy. In the case of Napa Valley may have been the case, but the lack of fences, guards, lines and other signs of involuntary internment in his photos make his photographs less reportage than feel good propaganda.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Roger,

No disrespect intended, but our (collective) jump to declaring such claims as "silly" is interesting to me. From the outset, we have a clear choice, don't we? Either every photograph, no matter the quality, content, context, subject, intent, medium, or creator, is "photography" and its maker is a photographer, or we have to start drawing lines around "photography" and "photographer." I could be said that Ansel was a conservationist with a camera, so I doubt he saw intent as the distinction between photography and non-photography. He used 35mm, MF, LF, so medium was not the distinction. Knowing what we know about Ansel, my guess is that he felt that one had to have a certain technical capability (and exercise that capability in the course of making photographs) to be a photographer and hence to engage in photography. He also seemed to care that the photographer created fine prints (not just negatives that were passed off to others to handle). We may disagree with his line-drawing, but I would hesitate to call it silly, unless of course you believe that anyone who presses a shutter button is a "photographer." The lines are not clear in my mind, but I think there are distinctions between a "shutter-presser" and a "photographer." Don't you?

Dear Jeremy,

Not really. If the "shutter presser" takes good pics (cf HCB) I don't think so.

Some pics depend on technical quality (for a given value of 'technical quality ') and others don't. Generally I am more moved by content than by 'technical quality'. Aren't you?

Note that I regard the quote/analysis as 'silly', not the photographer.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Juan Valdenebro]

The difference:

Ansel Adams wasn't recognized -historically- as a photographer, with the photographs he shot on negatives, but with the prints he "painted": what's interesting (to some people) in his prints, is that they're not what there's on his negatives, but a posterior creation: the landscapes he shows on his prints didn't really exist...

Each one of us can give that fact any desired relevance, but it's the truth.

Cheers,

Juan

 

[Keith]

He held his first exhibition of drawings at the Carlton Gallery in New York in 1975, but his body of photographic work would never become superseded by his artwork in the public’s affection.

A career as a more pure artist elude him because of his 'street groupies?'

Any thread pitting landscape against street whether it be by artist or actual output is going to be one sided IMO. I haven't seen any landscape threads on the main page for some time but I can bore myself with a succession of threads dealing with 'street' any time I get the urge!

 

[ferider]

the landscapes he shows on his prints didn't really exist...

That should be true for every "good" photograph, Juan; the only ones I'm interested in anyways. Better phrased: I want to see the photographers take/emotion on a landscape, person, a decisive moment, etc, not absolute reality (does it exist ? ). Not sure how this makes Adams different from, say, Bresson.

Roland.

 

[Roger Hicks]

A career as a more pure artist elude him because of his 'street groupies?'

Any thread pitting landscape against street whether it be by artist or actual output is going to be one sided IMO. I haven't seen any landscape threads on the main page for some time but I can bore myself with a succession of threads dealing with 'street' any time I get the urge!

Dear Keith,

I don't think anyone is pitting one against the other, but I for one am suggesting that 'street' (FSA) has had much more influence than LF formal landscape (AA) -- which is why it's so easy to bore yourself with a surfeit of 'street'.

Arguably, attempting to emulate AA is harder than emulating the FSA -- which, again, is why it's so easy to bore yourself with a surfeit of 'street'.

Cheers,

R.

 

[semilog]

Twith the prints he "painted": what's interesting (to some people) in his prints, is that they're not what there's on his negatives, but a posterior creation: the landscapes he shows on his prints didn't really exist...

A few weeks ago, this comment of mine was featured at The Online Photographer.

Re 'Tenaya Lake,' I've seen variations on this view many times. The rock formation that dominates the left half of the frame is, at least by climbers, called Stately Pleasure Dome. My first technical rock climbing lead was right there, on a route called The Great White Book, which follows the diehedral scribed by the very long bright diagonal in the photograph. On another climbing trip we camped at a site that could not have been more than 40 meters from where Ansel planted his tripod, and Adams's view was the view from our tent door. I have wondered whether he camped in that particular site, too.

What astonishes me about Adams's photo is how perfectly he understood the place, how light falls on it and the substance of the topography. And I have seen this same penetrating insight over and over in places that I've visited that he photographed.

I'll make a strong statement now, partly in response to some comments left at the original post. Those who say he had no feeling, or that he was a mere technician, have (most likely) never loved the land; or at least the landscape of the American West; have never themselves fully grappled with its substance or been immersed in its geology, its vegetation, its vastness, its light. For if they had done so, it surely would be impossible to say that Adams's photographs were sterile.

Seen from this perspective, Adams's work is entirely about love. Indeed, this [romanticism] is the basis of my major criticism of his work: he was sometimes blinded by his passion. His photographs, if they were more dispassionate, would have harbored more darkness, more foreboding, more banality, more decay. The very things that drove The New Topographics and so much landscape that followed, in fact. But to call Adams's work sterile or unfeeling is an admission that neither the work nor its subject has really been engaged by the viewer.

Ask anyone who has climbed or backpacked through the high Sierra. Adams's pictures told the truth about the places he photographed. A subjective truth, yes. But no photographer before, and few since, understood those places better than Adams did. And if you argue that his photographs are creations of the darkroom, look closely at W. Eugene Smith's work or that of any of socres of other great photographers across genres from journalism to street to fashion to landscape.

And if you look at this RFF thread you'll find that many here recommend the late Larry Bartlett's book. Therein you'll see more dodging and burning than Ansel could have shaken a stick at. Serious darkroom work is a huge part of photography, and to dismiss Adams for that reason is to also dismiss vast swaths of work by many (most?) of the art's greatest practitioners.

 

[ferider]

Any thread pitting landscape against street whether it be by artist or actual output is going to be one sided IMO.

Dear Keith,

I don't think anyone is pitting one against the other, but I for one am suggesting that 'street' (FSA) has had much more influence than LF formal landscape (AA) .....

You are proving Keith right.

Yosemite National Park exists. What did FSA really change ?

 

[Juan Valdenebro]

That should be true for every "good" photograph, Juan; the only ones I'm interested in anyways. Better phrased: I want to see the photographers take/emotion on a landscape, person, a decisive moment, etc, not absolute reality (does it exist ? ). Not sure how this makes Adams different from, say, Bresson.

Roland.

The two cases are totally different, Roland:

While HCB generated interest with the scene (the real facts) AA generated interest going away from the real scene: with internal contrast retouching...

As I said, every forum member can give that fact any desired relevance, but it's true...

About any landscape being as unreal as AA's ones, I disagree 100%.

Cheers,

Juan

 

[Roger Hicks]

You are proving Keith right.

Yosemite National Park exists. What did FSA really change ?

It was in the mainstream (and sometimes the vanguard) of reportage photography. Quite influential in the last 70 yrs. Probably more important than one national park in one country.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Keith]

Yeah ... well I can go to Yosemite any time I want and see what AA saw, loved and photographed perfectly IMO.

I won't be spending too much time in France searching for a Parisian suspended over a puddle though!

 

[semilog]

To be fair, Yosemite National Park exists because of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, than because of Ansel Adams. It was after all made a national park at roughly the same time that Adams was born. But that does not negate Adams's contributions to wilderness conservation, which were enormous.

 

[Juan Valdenebro]

The Relevance of AA'a photographs, in a world level, is minimal. He is considered a very important LF landscape photographer by some people in a country in the middle of the north of America, called the USA. The situation in the rest of the world is different: it's in the USA where lots of posters of his literally fantastic images are used to decorate... I couldn't imagine films (movies) consisting of retouched, romantic, unreal landscapes, being considered relevant movies in the history if film making: it's never been about that!

Cheers,

Juan

 

[semilog]

What did FSA really change ?

Work done by FSA photographers was of lasting importance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange

 

[Roger Hicks]

To be fair, Yosemite National Park exists because of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, than because of Ansel Adams. It was after all made a national park at roughly the same time that Adams was born. But that does not negate Adams's contributions to wilderness conservation, which were enormous.

Hey! Stop bringing FACTS into it!

Seriously, none of it's that important. As I said, it's reheating a 60-70-year-old argument. I'm intrigued by the passions (and knowledge) this thread has evoked.

Cheers,

R.

 

[TXForester]

And who has had more influence on (a) American photography and (b) world photography? AA or the FSA? I know who I'd back.

I'm going to say AA. He is still widely known today by young and old alike. Ask the young or Dorothea Lange is. [/blank stare]

Now if you put in a time frame, then the FSA probably had more influence back then. It showed people's plight to the rest of America. It's one thing reading it in the newspaper, hearing it the radio (assuming you owned one) or hearing it from the neighbors. It's something entirely different to see a print of a migrant worker barely staying alive.

 

[semilog]

...posters of his literally fantastic images are used to decorate...

Have you climbed in Yosemite? Have you backpacked in the High Sierra? I ask because you're implying that the images are so synthetic that they bear little relevance to the actual locales. That implication is incorrect. The most important images get to the very core of what those places look like.

To take a different tack: do you think that straight prints of Koudelka's negatives would have even passing similarity to many of the images that we know and feel so strongly about?

Please think a bit harder before posting gibberish.