Overrated photographers...

It depends on (a) who is doing the overrating and (b) on what basis. For the former, there are plenty who regard AA or HCB as quasi-divine, when in reality, they were just very, very good. For the latter, I've often found that seeing actual prints and whole exhibitions, in place of carefully chosen and perfectly-controlled reproductions, actually lowered my opinion of a photographer's work. AA was crazy to print Hasselblad negs the size he did; Karsh's focus was often off; Rodchenko (one of my favourites) wasn't always anything like as good as he was in the pics you normally see; Drticol's pics were often very muddy; and so forth.

Cheers,

R.
 
Gerry Winogrand, because he left behind thousands of rolls of film he never bothered to even look at. His work was compulsive overshooting and letting people like Szarkowski pick through to construct a body of work for him. He abdicated the most important part of a photographer's work, the process of editing one's own portfolio, to others.

Eggleston: Only made one important photo in my opinion, the tricycle. The rest was completely empty and devoid of visual interest.

Richard Prince: Career built upon copyright infringement. In the art world, that's somehow ok. If he were a writer, he'd be ostracized for plagairism, and rightly so.

As for Adams, he was a pioneer in a type of photography widely practiced now and his work is better than most of his imitators. I suspect that most of the anti-Adams feeling is simply a reaction against the fact that he is widely known among people outside the art world (if the masses like it, is cannot be good), and because so many have blindly imitated his style and techniques.
 
jerry burchard

stephen shore

william eggleston

Bruce Nauman

He's not a photographer, but I couldn't resist:
Julian Schnabel
 
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I guess I have to weigh in on supporting Adams here. I recently saw some of his original prints at the Amon Carter museum in Fort Worth (Texas) and I was impressed. I was short on time, but I probably could have spend hours staring at the extraordinarily high resolution of the details on the prints of his stunning Western landscapes -- the reproductions in art books simply cannot convey this detail and finery.
 
Adams's images became the "cash cows" for the Sierra Club in the 70's and 80's. Once Adams died then again like all "dead guys" they get a "cult" or "saint hood" status. His 5 book series (copyright 1968) was actually the text book for photo teachers in the late 70's. In 1978 he visited our school's Photography Dept. Cypress College for a Student Show, and also delivered a special over size "Moonrise over Half Dome" that we the students had ordered as a gift for a department head. I like his work ethic. I was a bigger fan of Brett Weston at the time.
 
Turtle said:
AA and HCB were both pioneers though. Hard to criticise people who cut a new path for others to copy.

My #1 would be Steve McCurry. One amazing shot "Afghan Girl" and then lots of shots that look like decent travel work (but no more) and with many which are formulaic and repetitive. I think with a lifetime of travel, many forum members here would have done as well if not better. His work has no edge, just that generic photographic competency mixed with evident opportunity, unlike the greats whose work have that something individual, as the evident product of an individual; a mind.
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Steve McCurry's work is easy some of my favorite. I challenge anyone not to be moved by one of his books. Afghan girl wasn't even that spectacular compared with the rest of his work. Just because someone else could match his work means nothing if they don't.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
Gerry Winogrand, because he left behind thousands of rolls of film he never bothered to even look at. His work was compulsive overshooting and letting people like Szarkowski pick through to construct a body of work for him. He abdicated the most important part of a photographer's work, the process of editing one's own portfolio, to others.

Eggleston: Only made one important photo in my opinion, the tricycle. The rest was completely empty and devoid of visual interest.
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Winogrand: none of that matters in the face of that one spectacular photo, I hope someday I can take such a photo.

Eggleston: I find them thrilling.

:D
 
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David Murphy said:
I guess I have to weigh in on supporting Adams here. I recently saw some of his original prints at the Amon Carter museum in Fort Worth (Texas) and I was impressed. I was short on time, but I probably could have spend hours staring at the extraordinarily high resolution of the details on the prints of his stunning Western landscapes -- the reproductions in art books simply cannot convey this detail and finery.
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What a shame he didn't use a twice as big format, for twice as great photographs... :p

Cheers,

Juan
 
Chris: could you use one single word to define Adam's imitated and pioneer style? Just one word. Or two, if you feel you can't do it with one...

Cheers,

Juan
 
I'm not saying anyone is overrated.
but I really really really don't like the work of cindy sherman and annie leibovitz.

oh wait, I know an overrated photographer:
ANNE GEDDES.
 
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I always thought of Leibovitz as an art director.. If you can't load a camera, and set the exposure.. can you be a photographer? Well i guess if you can trip the shutter..

Or in these days of tethered capture.. know a fire-wire port from a hole in the ground..

Any Annie stories? it's a small world..
 
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I've not made it as a photographer - so I'm not gonna say who I think its overrated, there's stuff I'm not keen on but that's like everything. I'm sure plenty of people can look at my stuff and think 'what a load of pap' - where I might be thinking damn that's a really starting to dig into what I'm about!

So instead I'll make reference to a humorous incident a year or two ago which changed my opinion.

I was out with friends doing a day's shooting in the South Downs which was really nice and all, their doing their thing I'm doing mine which is usually lock onto something snap, then the next thing snap, and I'm done in the location before they've got their tripods set up :) So we started nattering about photography as you do and it came up who we liked, didn't, felt over rated etc.

Up to this point my exposure to Eggleston was not through the Guide, but I had seen some stuff at some point and was left a bit unimpressed. Just as I was about to say Eggleston left me unimpressed, a friend said my some of photos reminded her of Eggleston's work. Of course I wasn't feeling over joyed about the prospect of being compared to someone who I didn't think much of. :) It turns out she had some involvement in curating and exhibition of his work some years ago so she has had some first hand contact with the work.

Since then with a bee in my bonnet I bought Eggleston's Guide and I have to say she was probably right. And while he is still not my favourite photographer, he is one where I have come around to understanding his work a little bit more; and in some cases really like some of his photos (red ceiling I think is great.)

So, some humble pie perhaps. I still don't think I'm in the same boat but I could at least see where she was coming from, and it was part of my ongoing education shall we say! :)

Vicky
 
In my view, Ansel Adams is overrated in the sense that, among people in the States without knowledge of photography, he is the quintissential photographer. While his prints are technically brilliant only few of them are great photographs. A few years I saw a large retrospective exhibition of Lee Friedlander in Paris, which had a room of prints shot with medium-format of some of landscape subjects that Adams made famous: they were much more interesting and better photographs than those of Adams.

On Annie Liebevitz, she had the misfortune, in my view, of having an exhibition of huge poster-size portraits of women at the Corcoran Gellery in Washington at the same time as an Arnold Newman retrospective exhibition — no comparison: her portraits couldn't stand up to any of Newman's work.

I always liked Eggleston but, before seeing any of his original prints, I always thought that his photographs were always putting the question before the viewer of "why is this a photograph?" After seeing his prints, whose colors are much better than can be seen in his books, I realized that he has an incredible sense of color.

—Mitch/Bangkok
Early Morning Market at Pak Nam Pran
 
I can think of several well known photographers whose work I do not like. But over-rated? No, I don't know of any. My personal taste is not the marker for importance.
 
In Response to me stating HCB and Frank were overrated.

Juan Valdenebro said:
Like saying in some art discussion Leonardo and Picasso were irrelevant: no fuel on the fire at all... :) But your two reasons are so peculiar... Curious points of view! Thanks!

Cheers,

Juan
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Do not get me wrong i consider both HCB and Robert Frank HIGHLY RELEVANT for the history and evaluation of photography. I even like their work. Overrated is something different in my opinion.
 
malland said:
In my view, Ansel Adams is overrated in the sense that, among people in the States without knowledge of photography, he is the quintissential photographer. While his prints are technically brilliant only few of them are great photographs. A few years I saw a large retrospective exhibition of Lee Friedlander in Paris, which had a room of prints shot with medium-format of some of landscape subjects that Adams made famous: they were much more interesting and better photographs than those of Adams.
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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
 
J. Borger said:
In Response to me stating HCB and Frank were overrated.



Do not get me wrong i consider both HCB and Robert Frank HIGHLY RELEVANT for the history and evaluation of photography. I even like their work. Overrated is something different in my opinion.
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How can someone that influential, and as you say highly relevant for the history and evaluation of photography, be overrated?

Cheers,

Juan
 
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