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

[jp]

And I mean "sublime" as the 19th-Century Romanticists discuss it in their treatises and try to express it their works – literary, musical, visual. The sense, that is, of something above and beyond the merely "beautiful."

I don't think AA had this activity to himself. Many photographers succeeded at this. Yet today (and then too) most simply were content with superficial beauty.

To answer the question...

I don't have a geography here typical of AA. I appreciate his work but I don't get all wrapped up in it. Eliot Porter, that's a different story. I embrace the intimate landscape and a greatly influenced by it even though I don't often do his exact style. Sometimes when I have a roll of color film in the rolleiflex I can't help it though and make some photos sufficiently derivative I could slip them into a EP book and confuse someone. I think intimate landscapes indirectly work well with my more usual style of pictorialism as there is little sense to capture a grand landscape without detail.

I have little use for changing cultural norms....

[Heroique]

Fight, embrace, ignore, despise, adore, react to, react against, and on and on. Different reactions at different times in my life.

This emotional tumult sums up, I think, the "ambivalence" toward AA that Ray Heath mentioned in post #6.

Briefly – a complex reaction, over time, to a powerful influence.

To be sure, it's coming out in several posts, many of which sound like a dutiful son struggling to find and assert his identity against an overly strong (but very good) father. The son sometimes adoring, sometimes defiant, sometimes accommodating. Father vs. son, in other words, the classic metaphorical struggle.

[jnantz]

he has never really influenced my landscapes ( i don't usually gravitate to landscapes landscape imagery )
but i can see how his work influences a lot of people. if he does influence me, i don't fight it, i don't think about it
and i don't worry about it.

[Corran]

As a landscape photographer, I am not that interested in his approach.

I would be interested to hear what you would define as "his approach" and in contrast "your approach" (or another photographer's approach that differs from AA that you take inspiration from).

[paulr]

The question presumes a belief expressed by John Szarkowsky, which is that American landscape photographers can't escape the shadow of Ansel. He said this because of Ansel's a huge cultural presence in the middle of the 20th Century. First through how-to books, then through landscape pictures, then through activism and celebrity. His ideas and images were in the air, and whether you liked or hated them, were acutely or vaguely aware of them, it was perhaps impossible to avoid their influenced entirely. Of course, rebellion is a kind of influence.

All of this is 100% separate from whether you think his work is good or interesting.

My personal path went from embracing to rejecting to thinking about other things entirely. But his influence is there if you dig for it, even if it's mostly 2nd or 3rd hand. You may be more indebted to Robert Adams' work, but this work, too, exists in a conversation framed in part by AA.

[Peter Lewin]

What strikes me about the question, and the posted responses, is that none of them mention historical context. Probably because I just finished reading Alinder's "Group f.64" which is entirely about historical context, I look at the question a little differently.

Ansel Adams was one of the founders of Group f.64, one of it's two most prominent members (along with Edward Weston), and probably it's most prolific writer. So Adams, with his friends, achieved or changed many things: they shifted the photography aesthetic away from pictorialism (imitating painting or sketching or another existing art form) to a more realistic approach to imagery (based on the unique optics of the camera), they helped establish photography as an art worthy of museum exhibitions at a time when most museums considered photography "less than an art," they established an entire "West Coast" school of photographers at a time when photography was concentrated in the East, and Adams in his role as an educator wrote not only articles, but his now famous series of books on cameras, prints, and negatives, as well as being a major contributor to the Sierra Club and the National Parks System. We take much of this for granted today, but it was new and ground-breaking when Adams did it. So rather than being "stale," much of what we do today is built on foundations that Adams, along with others, pioneered.

But I think what Heroique is getting at in his question is whether Adams's images are now stale. To some extent the answer is "yes," not because Adams was not a great photographer, but because the West Coast school of landscape photography has become ubiquitous. Various posters have joked about, how when they visited Yosemite and other Western landmarks, they put their tripods in Ansel's tripod holes. When I was in New Mexico on vacation, at Rancho de Taos, I had to consciously try to avoid replicating Paul Strand's or Adams's images. They were fresh when they made them, but now they border on cliche. I remember a similar thread on this forum, which dealt with the issue that almost any image we make has already been made. The conclusion which resonated the most with me was that while our images may not be original any more, the act of making them was original to each of us at the time, i.e. it is the circumstances and emotions involved in making our images that gives them value to each of us, not the final image itself.

[Michael Graves]

I have a harder time fighting the Paul Caponigro influence.

[Gary Tarbert]

Being based in Australia Ansel had very little influence on my photography , but i have seen some of Ansels work in the flesh and i must say if i were in another place , Another time that may have been been different

[John Kasaian]

Ansel Adams is a major influence on the way I see the landscape, but I don't consider the Zone System my religion. Does that make sense?

[fishbulb]

I like Ansel's work, and own a lot of his books. If you have a copy of "400 photographs" you can watch his work evolve over time. His early stuff, 1920s and earlier is generally pretty ho-hum. The more he did it the better he got. Like most of "the greats" he spent a lot of time on his craft. But that's not all he had going for him - he was also a good writer (and also got better over time), and a keen observer of nature and humanity. His final work, his autobiography, would be an excellent book, even if it had no photographs.

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
* born at the right time - where photography was starting to be taken seriously as art, but the art world had not yet been flooded with it
* born in the right place - California was his backyard, and he had many opportunities early in his career (San Francisco art circles) not available elsewhere

but also skill and hard work
* dedication to photography, exploration, and travel
* dedication to writing about it extensively (few other photographers of his day were as prolific)
* willing to make the sacrifices - long hours driving, getting up early, often traveling alone, etc.

So for me, I draw inspiration from the latter list. If I worked half as hard on my photography as Ansel did, I'd consider myself a success.