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

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TXForester said:
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.
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Which, I'm arguing, sank into the collective consciousness a lot more and was far more influential in subsequent discourse.

"Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" is known to countless photographers.

"Migrant mother, Nipomo" is known to a lot more non-photographers.

Cheers,

R.
 
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semilog said:
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.
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We?

Please think a bit harder before posting posting highly culturally specific assertions.

Cheers,

R.
 
Roger Hicks said:
We?

Please think a bit harder before posting posting highly culturally specific assertions.

Cheers,

R.
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I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough.

We: photographers all over the world who care about photo-documentation, street, and landscape. Not all photographers. Maybe not you. But many many people including me, who think that Koudelka is one of the all-time greats.

My point was that Juan appeared to be railing against Adams because the impact of his images relies in large part on previsualization and post-capture darkroom work. If we're going to use that fact to bludgeon Adams, we'll have to clobber an awful lot of other great photographers. Koudelka was merely one example among many, of photographers whose images in many cases rely on tonal manipulation in the darkroom to achieve expressive power.

Toss Adams over the rail because his prints don't look exactly like the linear tonal inverse of his negs, and you'll have to toss Koudelka and an awful lot of others over the rail with him.
 
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semilog said:
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough.

We: photographers all over the world who care about photo-documentation, street, and landscape. Not all photographers. Maybe not you. But many many people including me, who think that Koudelka is one of the all-time greats.

My point was that Juan appeared to be railing against Adams because the impact of his images relies in large part on previsualization and post-capture darkroom work. If we're going to use that fact to bludgeon Adams, we'll have to clobber an awful lot of other great photographers. Koudelka was merely one example among many, of photographers whose images in many cases rely on tonal manipulation in the darkroom to achieve expressive power.

Toss Adams over the rail because his prints don't look exactly like the linear tonal inverse of his negs, and you'll have to toss Koudelka and an awful lot of others over the rail with him.
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Sorry. I did indeed misunderstand your point.

A constant risk on the internet is reading what we think someone else is saying, rather than what they say.

Cheers,

R.
 
Roger Hicks said:
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.
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(Playing the landscape advocat again) That influence and the actual change it caused is debatable. Wars still happen, poor immigrants still do exist, fashism is alive and well, etc.

All I'm saying is that it very much depends on your viewpoint - different audiences do take it differently. How influential somebody is depends on the person(s) being influenced. What's the metric for influence anyways ? Change ? Money ? #prints ? Influencing an American president ? :confused:

I myself like looking for example at Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives (http://www.archives.gov/press/press-kits/picturing-the-century-photos/gallery1.html), which includes photos of most photographers mentioned in this thread, Lange, Adams, and others.

Roger Hicks said:
As I said, it's reheating a 60-70-year-old argument.
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Taking a single side, being partial about facts, and using mean rhetoric ("blinkered", "deceitful", "romantic", "propagandist", etc.) does reheat even the oldest arguments. Do not try at home :)

Roland.
 
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semilog said:
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.
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Those words are just yours: I never said that.

I'll repeat: Adams created images after photographing. HCB didn't. Both in general and for most of their works, of course...

And I'll repeat for the third time: any forum member can consider any of both options more valid than the other one, or not... I don't care. I just see they're totally different.

Cheers,

Juan
 
ferider said:
Taking a single side, being partial about facts, and using mean rhetoric "blinkered", "deceitful", "romantic", "propagandist", etc.) does reheat even the oldest arguments. Do not try at home :)

Roland.
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Dear Roland,

Well, you'd want to reheat it properly. Who wants a tepid argument?

And I did say that my observation was as nonsensical as AA's.

Cheers,

R.
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
Those words are just yours: I never said that.

I'll repeat: Adams created images after photographing. HCB didn't. Both in general and for most of their works, of course...

And I'll repeat for the third time: any forum member can consider any of both options more valid than the other one, or not... I don't care. I just see they're totally different.

Cheers,

Juan
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Dear Juan,

My mind is made up:: do not confuse me with the facts

And being reasonable as well as presenting the facts: well, that's totally beyond the pale.

Cheers,

R.
 
nextreme said:
Is that a requirement to posting ? Geeze, I was just saying I've seen the opposite to your observations.
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Not at all. Just might be interesting. I don't pretend I'm always right, and I'm intrigued by such arguments. Someone might care to research them more carefully than you or I.

Cheers,

R.
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
Yes, semilog: great direct prints from negatives have great relevance.
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So you're saying that photography should be reduced to linear tonal mappings (no shoulder! no toe!) of luminance data acquired in situ? That film should be banned from artistic photography because its tonal mapping is inherently nonlinear compared to the extremely linear response of a typical CCD or a good CMOS sensor?

If your view is more nuanced, perhaps you could tell us all which tonal manipulations are acceptable and which ones are not.

Also, since you appear to require a straight rendering of the scene, how much spherical aberration are our lenses permitted to have? And what DoF ranges are acceptable? Are we allowed to use filters? Are there specified color responses for the B&W films that are allowed?

Then, perhaps you can provide a list of good photographers who comply with your preferred technical specifications.
 
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I won't touch this topic with a ten-foot pole, except to share my own humble opinion that some of my favorite images were made by FSA "photographers." My open-minded catholicity of tastes, also permits me to enjoy some of AA's work, too. No value judgment here. It's a big world. I just like what I like. Anyway, AA's technical prowess doesn't equal, in my mind, deification of his aesthetic opinions. They're still just opinions.
 
Roger Hicks said:
Dear Juan,

My mind is made up:: do not confuse me with the facts

And being reasonable as well as presenting the facts: well, that's totally beyond the pale.

Cheers,

R.
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Wow Roger: we don't have that saying is Spanish... And I had never heard it in English...It's really nice... Thanks!

Dear members: I respect AA a lot as a person and as a photographer and as a teacher, and he was good at composing with lots of time... I just consider other things harder to achieve, but please don't think I'm against AA or any RFF member... It's not a personal discussion...

Cheers,

Juan
 
Mike Johnston:

This interview does contain one of my favorite "delicious ironies"—at one point (about 35:45 in this video) Cartier-Bresson says "I never crop"...and just beyond his right ear for the entire interview is the famous "Behind the Gare St. Lazare," which is one of two of his pictures that are always cropped (the negative contains a large bar of black all the way down the left side, and more foreground. The whole negative can be seen on p. 87 of Cartier-Bresson's new Thames & Hudson title, Scrapbook).
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Ah, the absolutist impulse. It's especially amusing that that picture is in every instance that I've seen printed with a black border, a darkroom manipulation that makes it appear to be printed full-frame. ;) (And yes, it's one of my five or six favorite photographs ever, and it should be cropped!)
 
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