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

[Heroique]

If you think AA's influence on how one visualizes the landscape is stale in our day and time, what is the best way for the practicing LFer to protest?

Shoot, print, and exhibit your own way? Promote the work of other artists? Wait patiently for cultural norms to change in their own mysterious way until they're more congenial to your own?

Or do you think such efforts pointless and, well, futile, since AA's most representative images communicate eternal, classic values – and will always remain worthy models for you to follow?

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Based on my always-limited (but ever-growing) knowledge of art through the ages of Western Civilization, I fall into the second camp on most days; yet based on what I know of AA's life and thought, it seems he'd applaud those who fall in the first camp, say "best of luck," but continue pursuing his own influential way...

[Jac@stafford.net]

If you think AA's influence on how one visualizes the landscape is stale in our day and time, what is the best way for the practicing LFer to protest?

Protest is not necessary, neither is looking for an antithesis for it surrounds us.

Ansel's work is already documentary. Saddening, is it not?

One project in the back of my mind is to photograph the USA's aerial infrastructure - the telephone, power, and cables that will eventually be buried. Any way one perceives them they remain remarkable.

[Ken Lee]

Let the muses guide you.

[Heroique]

Early bird tally:

Camp 1 (or, "AA isn't the boss of me"): 2 votes

Camp 2 (or, "AA's work and mine seek the same, eternal ideals"): 1 vote

This might go down to the wire!

[baro-nite]

Neither embrace nor fight. Acknowledge and accept, and try to learn from it.

[Ray Heath]

Why do you assume only two possibilities, for or against AA?

Some of us are ambivalent to his work.

[Heroique]

Why do you assume only two possibilities, for or against AA?

Some of us are ambivalent to his work.

It's an oversimplification designed to attract input and elaboration.

Your point about ambivalence toward AA's work helps do that.

That's actually my experience too, just not on "most days" as I stated.

[Drew Wiley]

AA ... yes, that's what the dictionary seems to start with, but frankly, the term involved is "aardvark", not Ansel. I just wish more people could read the dictionary
past that point, if you get my drift.

[Kirk Gittings]

Do you fight or embrace his influence on your landscapes?

Don't consciously think much about it one way or another. I respect his contributions, but don't deny or ride the coattails of his influence. Like O'Sullivan or the Westons or Wynn Bullock or Caponigro or Robert Adams or Sternfeld and many others, their aesthetic is simply part of the modern lexicon of landscape photography.

[Alan Gales]

Don't consciously think much about it one way or another. I respect his contributions, but don't deny or ride the coattails of his influence. Like O'Sullivan or the Westons or Wynn Bullock or Caponigro or Robert Adams or Sternfeld and many others, their aesthetic is simply part of the modern lexicon of landscape photography.

+1

I'm sure I have been influenced by other photographers but I just try to be myself and follow my own vision for good, bad or whatever.