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

[Lenny Eiger]

Actually, AA is more known for his work for lobbing Congress for Kings Canyon than Yosemite. Maybe if you could cite reference of these other photographer work and what they acheived.

David

David,

Just go to the library, or a bookstore, or lookup photohistory. There are a million references. Photography has been going on for 199 years. There is a lot of material.

You could start with the book "History of Photography" by Beaumont Newhall... It's pretty cheap on the internet bookstores - get a used copy... they're about $5.

Lenny

[Lenny Eiger]

Ah, yes, Clarence White, the photographer we are all truly descended from.

There are actually a lot of people that could be considered "descended" from Clarence White. While the body of published work we have is quite small, he was a teacher. Among his students were Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke White, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph Steiner, Annie Brigman, Karl Struss, my friend Laura Gilpin, and many others.

Lenny

[TXFZ1]

David,

Just go to the library, or a bookstore, or lookup photohistory. There are a million references. Photography has been going on for 199 years. There is a lot of material.

You could start with the book "History of Photography" by Beaumont Newhall... It's pretty cheap on the internet bookstores - get a used copy... they're about $5.

Lenny

Thanks but I fail to see how this will correct your mis-quotes. Deflect, use strawman arguements, call out the trolls whatever you like but if I agreed with you then we both would be wrong.

David

[Leszek Vogt]

Lenny, I think that was intended as a joke (at least to me).

Les

[Bernice Loui]

AA indeed used his photographs to lobby congress to protect and save many great wild places including Yosemite, AA remains as not the first to do this.
Writing books on photography, doing commercial work, work for the UC system, seminars and more was how AA earned his daily bread.

Regardless of all that, Bill Turnage marketed AA is ways that made AA a "household name" and created a brand identity that is well known to this day. That was much about money in ways only marketing folks can produce.

Consider for a moment what happened when a box of alleged AA negatives appeared out of the dust pile.. It became a battle over money again. Historically, many artist never see or have any fraction of the monetary value their work ever produced during their lifetime. What is significant art, what created AA's brand identity and it's worth-value today?
http://www.pdnonline.com/news/Slande...-Ga-1681.shtml

It is the collectors, investors and speculators that reap the monetary wealth from their work and decide their monetary worth. Art can be the heart and soul of a culture/society, Art can give culture and society a sense of identity and who they are in the world. Consider for a moment why Adolf Hitler rounded up significant works of art during the war as part of the Nazi regime's goal for global domination.


One needs to step back and take a much broader historical view of photography and art in general to find AA is just one string of thread in the much larger tapestry we know as art.


Bernice

[Peter Lewin]

There are actually a lot of people that could be considered "descended" from Clarence White. While the body of published work we have is quite small, he was a teacher. Among his students were Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke White, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph Steiner, Annie Brigman, Karl Struss, my friend Laura Gilpin, and many others.

Lenny

Lenny: This post of yours caught my eye, since I just got home from the AIPAD show in NYC. Because of this thread, I was consciously comparing the AA prints (I think I saw at least 5 "Moonrises") with various other photographers mentioned. At the Scheinbaum & Russek display, the "place of honor" went to two prints, one above the other. The top print was, not surprisingly, a large "Moonrise." The lower print was Laura Gilpin's "Storm Over La Brajada Hills, New Mexico." It was the Gilpin print which grabbed me, and several other people I saw viewing the work. Ansel's print, which I loved when I was first becoming interested in Large Format photography close to 50 years ago, now seemed overly dramatic, and lacking in subtlety, while Laura's print was simply wonderful. Tastes change.

[Peter Lewin]

Oh, one more quick comment about the AIPAD show, I will try to post a more complete set of thoughts tomorrow. At the Scott Nichols Gallery display, there were works by many of the original Group f.64 photographers, including of course Adams and Weston, but also many others. Out of all the prints that were hung, I made a note that the one which I responded to the most was a print by William Garnett, "Train Crossing the Desert Near Kelso, California." A much more quiet image than anything Adams would have done. I don't know if Garnett, born in 1916, would have been accepted into f.64, he would have been a mere 20-year-old by 1936 when f.64 was already well-established. Just another example of how my tastes, at least, have shifted from the grandiose Yosemite pictures of Adams, to less dramatic, but possibly more engaging, works. (And if pricing indicates anything, the $36,000 they were asking for Garnett's 16x20 print was right up there with Adams, Weston, and company.)

[Darin Boville]

It was the Gilpin print which grabbed me, and several other people I saw viewing the work.

Every time I see a Laura Gilpin print (especially silver gel) I do a double-take and think, "Damn, that's a well printed image."

--Darin

[jp]

I never had much opinion about Porter, but the last few summers i've been spending a week at his old island in Maine ... I'm friends with the family of his brother Fairfield, the painter. Eliot's darkroom is up there, and his grave, and his prints and posters and books are all around. There's plenty of time to look at all of it. It's fun to see the pictures he made of the little island, where hardly anything's changed. The work is very pretty and I have no grudge with its popularity. But the exciting historical part for me is hanging out at the table where Eliot and Fairfield used to drink with John Ashbery and Frank O'hara.

Jealous is an understatement.

Ignore Porter's western and international material. If you ever have a longing to return to the island, you can open a good copy of his books like Summer Island, and the intimate landscapes of little things you see wandering around will hit you like a ton of bricks; they seem more subtle than his successors. I live near the island and spend much time in similar woods, and looking through his books at the college library made me want to go home, and I don't get homesick. If you aren't spending time enjoying the woods, it's going to be understood different, more a visual beauty thing and less as thoreauvian experience. I think that's why it was a hit with the Sierra club crowd.

[Drew Wiley]

This thread has gone all over the place, with me among the culprits. Bill Garnet? Well, he was more akin to BW or Merg R. as having a distinctly "abstract" mode
of viewing the world, except from the air. Brilliant. Color work not quite as inspired, but still worth seeing if you get the chance. But mostly contrasty silver prints much in character with the f/64 or West Coast style. Laura Gilpin much the opposite, more related to the pictorialists, but evolved beyond them. She had some lovely early color work, then quite a legacy of Southwest platinums, work I personally admire a great deal. A great deal of human warmth in them, which is a rare quality. Eliot P. and AA are analogous in respect to how people simply think they can shoot the same subject matter and get the same thing. That's because everyone is in a damn hurry and can't understand nuance. Both are hard acts to follow, even if critics and academics are themselves to much rush around the web types these days to know the difference themselves. You need to spend some time looking. AA's work was deeply infused with his background
of Classical music and its sense of balance, nuance, tone modulation. The average Joe just sees dramatic scenery. But that's not what it's about at all, though
this has certainly helped in the commercial aspect. Porter saw the world as a complex tapestry, and ecosystem inspired by Thoreau. Who else would have made
beautiful compelling pictures of seemingly bland tones of tan and brown with patterns of bird shit all over them? Not exactly the kind of theme Fauxtoshopper
would try to turn into a screensaver. That took guts, esp when such things landed on the pages of glossy coffee table books that were very expensive to make
in the first place. It wasn't all pink redbud blossoms.