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

[paulr]

Yeah, Weston had some stinkers. A lot of critics have lambasted his nudes over the years (I don't mind them). But the WW2 cat pictures, the nude with gas mask, and the whole Leaves of Grass project ... not awesome.

Still, I think AA's best work is only occasionally rises to the level of W's average work. I don't see them as being on the same level.

FWIW, among the people who shared this assessment are Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.

[paulr]

Yeah, Weston had some stinkers. A lot of critics have lambasted his nudes over the years (I don't mind them). But the WW2 cat pictures, the nude with gas mask, much of the Leaves of Grass project ... not awesome.

Still, I think AA's best work is only occasionally rises to the level of W's average work. I don't see them as being on the same level.

FWIW, among the people who shared this assessment are Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.

[Drew Wiley]

That's not what I was referring to, Paul. EW made apparently sorted out his keepers from his losers, but a number of the losers somehow resurfaced in succeeding generations and made it to a secondary market. I sometimes keep less than ideal prints myself just as a reference point for eventually reprinting the image better the next round. Then I tear up the lemons. Nobody hits a home run every time. Nobody. I think AA was exceptional at achieving the feel he wanted in an image. I don't put him at the same level of printmaking as either Edward or Brett Weston. But EW rarely enlarged, and if he did, not many negs would hold up well. A different ballgame. I was fortunate to see a number of genuine EW prints when I was young. AA came much later, when I was already on the road, so to speak. But oddly perhaps, I actually appreciate some of EW's earlier, more "pictorialist" prints better than his later f/64-style work.

[Peter Lewin]

Somehow this thread seems to have turned into a debate over the merits of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. The only comment I can make is that I have seen lots of prints by both (living near NYC museums, and attending the annual AIPAD show for quite a few years now) and they were both wonderful printers. Did they have duds? Sure. But I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't be happy with prints from either.

But the reason I'm posting is two-fold. I just found a new book at my local library (someone there must love photography!) called "Landmark: the Fields of Landscape Photography" by William Ewing, published by Thames & Hudson, 2014. Ewing groups 240 contemporary images (21st century works only, no images by Weston or Adams) into 10 categories, which is an interesting approach in itself: Sublime, Pastoral, Artifacts, Rapture, Playground, Scar, Control, Enigma, Hallucination, and Reverie.

But most germane to the initial subject of this thread, Ansel Adams's impact on landscape photography, I will excerpt from his introductory text:

"The 20th century figure most associated with landscape photography in the public mind is, of course, Ansel Adams. Indeed, it is no stretch of the imagination to say he was for many years, and still remains, a household name. ... That the first photograph of Earth from deep space would be baptized Earthrise was an indirect homage to Adams's well-known Moonrise. He gave the world a newly minted concept of the Romantic Sublime, and implied imperiously that it was all preordained: 'Sometimes I do get to places just when God is ready to have someone click the shutter.' It is fair to say that Adams dominated the worlds of landscape photography, both professional and amateur, for many years (and still has a tremendous stature among amateurs) until, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation arrived with a very different mind-set. The 'new topographers' as they were called ... were decidedly not interested in the monumental and the mysterious."

[Drew Wiley]

... And now "New Topographers" are dime a dozen and monotonous as hell. That started half a century ago! Some of them could print (or eventually learned to do so), and some were utterly miserable at it. I saw a lot of their earliest work up close, right at the time before it really broke out. So the term "new" is relative, and most of those guys will soon be dead themselves, but probably with very little of their ephemeral fame intact. But it was a break in routine, and some of those experiments were certainly interesting even if poorly executed. Most of it was pretentiously artsy, just like the Pop Art that preceded it. But like any major trend, a few things still ring true and deserve a second look, even if its in books. Most of the originals have long since faded. Most of it was in Type C color. They were indeed the anti-Ansels, but even more the anti-Eliots. Desecration of nature in image form became fashionable.

[Kirk Gittings]

Desecration of nature in image form became fashionable.

more like desecration of nature recorded in image form.

[Richard Wasserman]

I think The New Topographics was an important exhibit. They were indeed the Anti-Ansels as they removed the pursuit of drama and beauty in photography and replaced it with a clean vision depicting the landscape with all its warts, and often a sense of humor (usually a dark one). Only Stephen Shore worked in color, the rest were B&W.

[Drew Wiley]

I don't know where you get that idea, Richard. Nearly all of the pioneers of that trend worked with color neg film, and quite a few originally made 8x10 contact
prints because they couldn't afford to enlarge them. Somewhat later, as some of them got noticed, they had grants and so forth allowing pro labs to enlarge their
negs.

[Richard Wasserman]

I don't know where you get that idea, Richard. Nearly all of the pioneers of that trend worked with color neg film, and quite a few originally made 8x10 contact
prints because they couldn't afford to enlarge them. Somewhat later, as some of them got noticed, they had grants and so forth allowing pro labs to enlarge their
negs.

Here you go— http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/407

[Kirk Gittings]

Yes indeed Richard, only Shore used color in the original exhibit that defined the movement. Drew many of them were academics and certainly had the resources to enlarge and Robert Adams (who and given up an academic career in English was no longer an academic then and never had steady income from that point forward-his wife was a librarian in a smallish Colorado town) always enlarged.