Clearing Storm

[tgtaylor]

Here's a picture by Henry Peach Robinson that I ran across in my readings on the history of photography:

131071

Robinson was a well-known photographer active in the pictoralism movement in the late 19th century. I'm sure that Ansel Adams was familiar with his book The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph published in 1896 and available as a free download on the web. I wonder if this was an influence to the Clearing Storm published by AA much later. Or more succinctly: Do Adams (and by extension the F64 group) owe more to Pictorialism than what is admitted?

Thomas

[jp]

Adams started out as a pictorialist and was not a master of it but was surely influenced and educated by it.
I think the concepts of visualization lean heavy on the practical skills employed in pictorialism styles and process, by necessity.

[John Kasaian]

I recollect looking at photo illustrations in the old (circa 1920's-1930's) textbooks at school and it just occurred to me that many of these were of the pictorialist genre!

[BrianShaw]

I'm betting that you are correct Thomas.

[Ken Lee]

Pictorialism was a movement in reaction to commercial photography. Today, we would call it "Fine Art Photography". The term pictorial was first used by Henry Peach Robinson in 1869 to distinguish fine art photography from technical, scientific, and documentary approaches.

As jp pointed out, one of its early exponents in California was none other than Ansel Adams, who wrote the following:


"I am more than ever convinced that the only possible way to interpret the scenes hereabout is through an impressionistic vision... Form, in a material sense, is not only unnecessary, but sometimes useless and undesirable." (Ansel Adams, Letters and Images 1916-1984 by Alinder and Stillman).

Needless to say, that was written by the pictorialist Ansel Adams - before he became the f/64 Ansel Adams.

[blueribbontea]

A much better possible influence would be Peter Henry Emerson and the bunch of American naturalist photographers that he influenced . Peach Robinson, on the contrary was noted for dramatic interiors made from multiple negatives.

[cowanw]

With regrds to what is above, Adamson was more of the romantic Style
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/romanticism.htm
The tenets of romanticism included: a return to nature - exemplified by an emphasis on spontaneous plein-air painting - a belief in the goodness of humanity, the promotion of justice for all, and a strong belief in the senses and emotions, rather than reason and intellect.

From the Adams web site, this is acknowledged but swept aside because Adams was just better at it.

"Adams has been compared to the landscape photographers of the nineteenth century, William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan, as well as nineteenth century painters of the sublime landscape, such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt. It might be argued that Adams is one of the last in the Romantic tradition. But there is a point beyond which such comparisons cannot be carried. Adams himself feels that the Romantic artists were “sincere but limited ‘scene’ painters” who were primarily “commemorating in dramatic style the huge ‘external events’ of landscapes….Few examples of what I call the internal event were revealed.”

According to critic Jon Holmes, “There is something in Adams ‘ spirit reminiscent of pioneer Western photographers. Adams ‘ subject matter—awesome nature—is the same. Through the years he has certainly put in enough miles leading mules laden with equipment over the Sierras to equal the stamina and endurance of [Jackson and O’Sullivan]. His tools are better than theirs, but as both recorder and printmaker, his craft is far greater. Adams , in addition, has that quality which, in 1932, his close friend, Edward Weston, described in a letter to him as ‘seeing plus.’”

John Szarkowski of New York ‘s Museum of Modern Art has said: “What Adams ‘ pictures show us is different from what we see in any landscape photographer before him. They are concerned, it seems to me, not with the description of object—the rocks, trees, and water that are the nominal parts of his pictures—but with the description of the light that they modulate, the light that justifies their relationship to each other.” "

Whether He will continue to be seen as better at revealing "the light that justifies their relationship to each other.” we will see in 50 years or so.

[tgtaylor]

It's interesting to note that the debate between the adherents of “hard” and “sharp" photography as exemplified by Group f.64 and the “soft” and “diffuse” photography of the pictoralists began with the Calotype. At that time photography was separated into two workable processes: the daguerreotype which had been adopted by the commercial portrait studio and the calotype which was the choice of the amateur who wanted to keep at a distance from anything that hinted of trade. It was the latter process that was deemed to be “artistic.”

[Tim Meisburger]

I think AA never stopped being a pictorialist. He himself admitted that none of his images faithfully reproduced what he saw; he always manipulated them to try to convey what he felt. Sounds pretty romantic to me...

[blueribbontea]

[It's interesting to note that the debate between the adherents of “hard” and “sharp" photography as exemplified by Group f.64 and the “soft” and “diffuse” photography of the pictoralists began with the Calotype. At that time photography was separated into two workable processes: the daguerreotype which had been adopted by the commercial portrait studio and the calotype which was the choice of the amateur who wanted to keep at a distance from anything that hinted of trade. It was the latter process that was deemed to be “artistic.”


The simplification to "hard vs. soft" is a later debate. Peach Robinson and others who made composite images made their photographs as sharp as they could. The calotype, of course, could not by its nature get very sharp or resolved as the metal plate of the daguerreotype, but another reason people might have chosen the paper negative over the metal plate was that the calotype was much easier to master, and then it also produced a negative. The real debate shows up once both of these initial systems became obsolete with glass negatives. When both commercial studios and amateurs used the same materials, then distinctions between artistic and non-artistic?? photographs could take life, and later in the 19th century the turn to "painterly' printing practices and "fuzzy" photography. It is a perennial tension apparently as the photoshop tools now replace the knife and the pencil etc.. Adams distinguished between "photographic" tools to alter or adjust an image an "non-photographic" tools, the former being acceptable and necessary.