Ansel Adams: Do you fight or embrace his influence on your landscapes?

[paulr]

My bigger point with all this ... that the more you're aware of your influences, the more choice you have in how to respond to them.
One choice is to actively expand the sphere of your influences. Which I think is called education.

[Bruce Watson]

You do realize (don't you?) that this is going to upset many people here who are very proud of their derivative and imitative work.

Imitating the masters is one way of learning. It can be a good teaching tool. But you do it enough and you begin to deviate from the masters. First you start walking beside their path, then you start branching off from their path because you see something that you find interesting that they would have ignored, and pretty soon you find that you're making your own path.

If you'd asked me in the beginning I would have told you with great conviction that the group-64 ideal of everything in focus was the truth of photography. But my style evolved away from that to where I was using the plane of focus as yet another tool in directing the eye of the viewer. I went from true believer to heretic. Oh well.

[Drew Wiley]

Jillions of outdoor photographers have imitated AA's technical approach - after all, he did a very good job teaching it. And jillions imitate his typical subject matter. Very few inherited his poetic sensitivity or respect for the nuances of light; and frankly, that is an aspect that quite a few people apparently can't even recognize, even when they try to mimic the relatively dramatic famous images. I personally feel a continuity with the whole West Coast tradition of fine printmaking. But my relation to mountain and coast subject matter is native, not an acquired affectation. That's where I'm from. And as far as things like the Zone System go, I merely adapt what is logically useful to me and ignore the rest. In fact, other than using it as a common-denominator communication tool on forums like this one, I never even think about it, either in the field or in the darkroom. All that became spontaneous a long time back, and a whole lot more.

[Drew Wiley]

Hmmm.... my apologies, Fishbulb. I thought I had taken the site down. Oh well. No priority either way. But it's precisely because of attitudes like yours that I despise visual web communication in general. Looking at images on the web is like trying to hear a symphony with a lawmower going next door. In other words,
its a very very poor tool for non-verbal, non-technical content. But I'll get around to at least improving my own site once I get my new copy station in place. I've
torn out the old one, repainted the floor etc etc. Got about two years of backlog drymounting before I can even think of a subsidiary project like that.

[Heroique]

Heroique, The point I was making is that the "search for autonomy" is meaningless. The accumulated weight of tradition is simply the cultural milieu we grew up and exist in. The "influences from myriad sources" [I love quoting myself...] can be positive, negative, ambivalent, whatever you wish, but they still make us who we are, whether we like it or not. I don't think we're impeded by our influences, rather, our work would be impossible without them.

I think what you're struggling to point out is the grand, general theme of the individual (or the artist) vs. society – or, as it applies to this thread, one's individual landscape work vs. Ansel Adams' influence.

It's revealing how much energy you're putting into acknowledging how you're being made by society, and how little energy into how you, as an individual, might make or influence it.

Your remark that "the search for autonomy is meaningless" is a clear symptom of this!

It's a cross-pollinating dynamic, of course, with the direction of emphasis (between individual and society) dependent on the person, the society, the historical time period, etc.

In brief, I think your remarks suggest you're feeling a great cultural load or burden on your shoulders, which naturally comes, as it should, with education. And you're not alone in feeling this in the advanced, complex, tradition-informed culture we live in. But try to shake it off once in a while! You can perform such a revolutionary act of independence, and in a socially meaningful way, if you learn about your "myriad influences" as best you can, then when it's important, resist and try to influence them for a change.

You can find the individual again. ;^)

I went from true believer to heretic.

You just said in seven words what I tried to say with a bushel!

[Drew Wiley]

I have close to zero artistic influence on anyone, and really don't care. Once in awhile it is gratifying to share images, show stuff, make a buck, etc. But artistic and social influence are more related to mass-dissemination than quality per se. AA did apply his skills to noble causes, like the creation of Kings Canyon NP. But images are also used for "swiftboating". Even the Spanish-American War was triggered at the popular level by a "photoshopped" image - in that era meaning a widely published drawing of a fictitious event; but it had the same calculated effect. Possibly the most influential photograph in history is the Marlboro Man. Hardly a work of art, but look at how many people it has killed! So by some definitions of "art", one of those billboards should land in a museum as the greatest piece of all time. But all it takes is one of my routine typos to turn the word "art" into "rat". At least a rat indicates some species of foul rodent; who the heck knows what art means, or fine art. Rat vs fine rat, I guess.

[Jmarmck]

Hardly a work of art, but look at how many people it has killed!

*Thinks of Hitler's watercolor that is for sale.*

[Drew Wiley]

Hitler's art has been ridiculed, and perhaps he was indeed frustrated in terms of a potential fine arts career. But he was good enough to have hypothetically made
a living as a commercial illustrator. The sales appeal of infamy in the sheer lack of talent would better fit someone like John Wayne Gacy. Or, for a combination of
rage as the formal response to being artistically dissed, try Charles Manson and his guitar.

[Will S]

So Ansel's success is a mixture of luck
* born into middle class, so he got an education and was able to write well, and could move in the right circles
//snip
If I worked half as hard on my photography as Ansel did, I'd consider myself a success.

To support your point, don't forget he was ADHD or possibly borderline autistic and couldn't attend school in his youth. He was extremely lucky in the father he had. Especially, I think for that time. And Adams evidently worked almost every day of the year ( except when he was hungover :-))

[David_Senesac]

No direct influence mainly because his body of work was in black and white with large format view camera equipment I knew little about. Never had formal schooling in photography because at an amateur level its nature is not so complicated or difficult to understand that one needs formal instruction.

The formative years of my photography were in 80s using early 35mm SLR cameras shooting color transparencies. I bought my camera's system thick user book which had thorough basic information about photography and read it numerous times. I was more influenced by the many photography magazines of that era like Popular Photography, Outdoor Photography, and the like. Galen Rowell's Mountain Light was probably the most influential at an artistic level. I was somewhat influenced by what I like in all manner of others work as my own sense of the aesthetic evolved. For many years I made lots of prints, hung them on my walls, and thus evolved a more advanced aesthetic sense by having to judge them repeatedly. Also as an old hi tech computer person that used Photoshop from the early days mid 90s, working at that intimate level tends to force one to really start to understand image visual aesthetics from their micro element structural levels.