Overrated photographers...

Juan Valdenebro said:
Well said... Outside the US, Adams isn't a relevant photographer: he's just another one, related with dodging-burning of large format landscapes, a man worried about technical procedures with film and prints, and someone who loved natural parks, but nothing close to the greatest photographers of all time, more related to expression of human life...

I own several books reviewing "the best photographers" and in most of them Adams has very small mention or doesn't even appear. His influential work was the zone system, more than his images if we talk about the world.

Cheers,

Juan
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Dear Juan,

A fascinating analysis, and one that's quite hard to argue with.

As for the Zone System, the naming of Zones was a work of genius but the sensitometry is crude and derivative and (above all) pointless in an era when you can buy affordable densitometers.

Incidentally, I wish I could write Spanish with the clarity you habitually bring to English. Distressingly few native English/American speakers are as good. Sure, there are occasional grammatical errors or at least idiosyncrasies, but they almost never stand in the way of comprehension.

Cheers,

R.
 
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I'm a way overrated photographer! When my friends tell me how my photos are great I just laught at them and tell them they've got a cr@py taste! 😀
 
Interesting thread. Initially I thought it would irritate like the 'academy of the overrated' of Mary and Yale in Woody Allen's 'Manhattan'.
 
Roger Hicks said:
Dear Juan,

A fascinating analysis, and one that's quite hard to argue with.

As for the Zone System, the naming of Zones was a work of genius but the sensitometry is crude and derivative and (above all) pointless in an era when you can buy affordable densitometers.

Incidentally, I wish I could write Spanish with the clarity you habitually bring to English. Distressingly few native English/American speakers are as good. Sure, there are occasional grammatical errors or at least idiosyncrasies, but they almost never stand in the way of comprehension.

Cheers,

R.
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Very sweet of you, Roger... I really appreciate it...

Cheers,

Juan
 
it doesnt need to evolve into a fight (the thread). It can just start some nice discussions on why some people like what some others don't.
It's not about football 😀

Me personally, i bought a large gerda taro book after reading very favourable comments here on RFF, and knowing she was working with Capa whom i like very much...
Gerda Taro's photography did absolutely nothing to me. I haven't found a single photo in that collection that i really liked. It doesn't even come close to Capa in my oppinion.

Also, Ansel Adams is a big boring... definitely has the good technique that i'd love to have but his imagery is always the same and very static for me.
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
How can someone that influential, and as you say highly relevant for the history and evaluation of photography, be overrated?
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Well, you yourself mention the example of Ansel Adams, who over here is regarded just a good printer and the creator of the Zone System, while all this does not automatically make him a great photographer. In a similar vein, I would consider HCB overrated as well.

As far as I can see, the main practice he is associated with, that of photographing action in terms of decisive moments, owes much more to earlier European photographers - such as Munkácsi, for instance. And there is the great, though possibly apocryphal quotation about HCB's decisive moments actually happening when he pointed his printer to a frame in his contact sheets. Finally, I suspect that a lot of rangefinder and Leica photographers are prone to overrating HCB because he was a famous rangefinder and Leica user.

The most important influence that HCB had, in my eyes, is the founding of Magnum. And that is, again, on an entirely different level, related more to the functioning of photojournalism than to its artistic and pictorial expression. In that way, even the impact of the Zone System was more powerful in how it influenced the working practice of many landscape and portrait photographers. This impact notwithstanding, the actual photographic body of work left by both HCB and AA needs to be assessed separately, at least in my opinion; and there I find both overrated indeed.
 
Pherdinand said:
Also, Ansel Adams is a big boring... definitely has the good technique that i'd love to have but his imagery is always the same and very static for me.
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Right, like an XXX movie: once you saw one, you saw them all...😱 Ouch, that was rude, and just a joke, Ansel! You're better than that for sure! I promise I'll delete it soon! 😀

Cheers,

Juan
 
I simply do not understand the work of William Eggleston. Not a bit. In the worst moments I wonder if curators and critics chose his work in order to shock the art in a way that one shocks a contaminated pool. It is made more caustic and unfriendly to bacteria and humans alike.

But there are many things I do not understand.
 
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I think it is awful hard to claim a photographer is overrated, unless and until one has personally interacted with that photographers art. Seeing Adam's or Sexton's or Caponigro's work in a book or on the computer screen is not sufficient. Until you've held and examined their prints, you have very little ground upon which to make any claim about their work and whether it is overrated. These photographers, and others, demonstrated their artistry best in the darkroom. Now, the same may not necessarily be true for a Cartier-Bresson.
 
rxmd said:
Well, you yourself mention the example of Ansel Adams, who over here is regarded just a good printer and the creator of the Zone System, while all this does not automatically make him a great photographer. In a similar vein, I would consider HCB overrated as well.

As far as I can see, the main practice he is associated with, that of photographing action in terms of decisive moments, owes much more to earlier European photographers - such as Munkácsi, for instance. And there is the great, though possibly apocryphal quotation about HCB's decisive moments actually happening when he pointed his printer to a frame in his contact sheets. Finally, I suspect that a lot of rangefinder and Leica photographers are prone to overrating HCB because he was a famous rangefinder and Leica user.

The most important influence that HCB had, in my eyes, is the founding of Magnum. And that is, again, on an entirely different level, related more to the functioning of photojournalism than to its artistic and pictorial expression. In that way, even the impact of the Zone System was more powerful in how it influenced the working practice of many landscape and portrait photographers. This impact notwithstanding, the actual photographic body of work left by both HCB and AA needs to be assessed separately, at least in my opinion; and there I find both overrated indeed.
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I can't follow your order of thoughts and conclusions on your first paragraph... I just feel Ansel Adams has not been really influential as a photographer... He didn't have a special style as photographer... Maybe as a printer... If we discover some lost plates by Adams (as just happened) and make direct prints, they're nothing special... Maybe well composed as many shots by many people, but the man was in great part a painter at printing... As he used to say, he cared a lot about the performance (printing): he used more time there than producing the score (negative)...

And about Cartier-Bresson, his fame and how he is loved, has no relation with the brand he used... Leicas were just the great option then: first he used Barnacks and then Ms...

Cheers,

Juan
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
Right, like an XXX movie: once you saw one, you saw them all...😱 Ouch, that was rude, and just a joke, Ansel! You're better than that for sure! I promise I'll delete it soon! 😀

Cheers,

Juan
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that's a funny comparison...
because, although you are absolutely right that they are all the same, the xxx industry is still blooming..since ages.. so there's enough market to buy all of it!
i don't understand this apparent contradiction.

is it the same with Ansel Adams?🙂
 
Pherdinand said:
Further, i like Man Ray's photos but his "rayograms" look to me just what they are..a silly accident... all of them. They are not even "cool" or "inventive" or "artistic".
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I think Man Ray was too worried about producing a real and new surreal photography... (Surreal as automatic expression coming from our deep, dark inside...) But I'm not sure it is even possible... Photography is "reproductive" and can't easily be automatic speech, writing or painting, so I feel he was too pressed by himself trying to offer his group and the world an amazing and new photography... He did some nice things in lots of new styles, he made some other "more normal" wonderful photographs, but I guess he felt he failed in some way, and I just wish he had not been at all involved with the group he was... He was a great artist, and he spent too much effort searching instead of producing... He did a great work anyway... Maybe I just want more...

Cheers,

Juan
 
Pherdinand said:
it doesnt need to evolve into a fight (the thread). It can just start some nice discussions on why some people like what some others don't.
It's not about football 😀

Me personally, i bought a large gerda taro book after reading very favourable comments here on RFF, and knowing she was working with Capa whom i like very much...
Gerda Taro's photography did absolutely nothing to me. I haven't found a single photo in that collection that i really liked. It doesn't even come close to Capa in my oppinion.

Also, Ansel Adams is a big boring... definitely has the good technique that i'd love to have but his imagery is always the same and very static for me.
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I think the value of Taro's work is here place in history. Being Capa's love-of-his-life. And the fact she was a female war-photographer, not a common thing, even to this day. Her pictures don't do much for me either.
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
I can't follow your order of thoughts and conclusions on your first paragraph...
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What I mean by that is that you can be influential in the history of photography, and yet still be overrated as a photographer. Ansel Adams falls into this category in my opinion, simply because he was influential as a printer and the Zone System had an impact on large format photography, while his photographs are not particularly outstanding.

HCB falls in a similar category in my book. The actual invention of his style had taken place a decade earlier:

three%20boys%20munkacsi%20small.jpg


This is "Three boys at Lake Tanganyika", shot by Munkácsi in 1929, and cited by HCB as the only picture that ever influenced him.

So in my opinion, HCB's legacy is mainly in founding an influential agency and coining a powerful label for a style of street photography he was practising, but not in being a great innovator of photography.

Whenever I went to HCB shows, they have left me slightly bored. I can sympathise with what Roger mentioned earlier, that there are some photographers where it is better to look at individual shots rather than the whole œuvre. He mentioned Rodchenko, and I completely agree; I adore some of the man's shots and much of his graphic work, but if I want to see that, I'd rather look through 1920s and 1930s issues of "USSR In Construction" than through a Rodchenko book. And HCB, at least in my opinion, is such a case as well.

And about Cartier-Bresson, his fame and how he is loved, has no relation with the brand he used... Leicas were just the great option then: first he used Barnacks and then Ms...
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Well firstly I don't care much about what gear he used; he could have used a Contax or whatever, but in his case I think it makes no difference at all.

And your assertion that how he is loved has no relation with the brand (or rather the camera type) he used - I don't think I agree with that. Every second discussion about the "rangefinder style" or the "Leica style" of photography etc. is guaranteed to mention HCB at some point. We have a forum full of rangefinder enthusiasts here, who see the rangefinder as the primary means of distinguishing themselves from the rest of the photographer crowd. A lot of people here try to imitate a style of black-and-white, decisive-moment-seeking street photography that they associate with HCB, simply because, to them, this is how rangefinder photography is done and what it should accomplish. You have evidence for that in discussions all over RFF (and other places); there are even street photography contests where you can win a rangefinder by producing this kind of shot. So I think it's not an unreasonable assumption that people in a rangefinder forum are likely to love HCB more.
 
I'm not a good enough photographer to make that kind of judgement about another, so I will restrict myself to saying that there is one whose work some rave about but which I have never understood:

Martin Parr
 
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