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

[paulr]

If you ever have a longing to return to the island, you can open a good copy of his books like Summer Island

Oh yeah, they have a 1st edition of this at the house. I've looked at it. I'm going back in August and will have another look. It's all pictures from that island.

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.

We go up there to enjoy the woods. And the water. There isn't much else to do! Gorgeous spot. It's really a special place

[cowanw]

White and his connection to modernism has not gone unnoticed. These photographers, as well as Charles Sheeler, are a pretty remarkable group of modernists.

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

[Drew Wiley]

Sheeler and White in the same sentence ???? That's like combining matter and antimatter. Sheeler was the only person I can think of, who as a constructivist,
came anywhere near to Carleton Watkins. And Watkins had the tougher job because he was working with natural forms rather than industry. It might take awhile
to understand what I am saying; but maybe a few people will recognize it. I can think of exactly zero photographers ever since who even understood the problem
these two guys were trying to unravel and peg within a two-dimensional frame. I recognize it, but also recognize that "a man has to know his limitations".

[cowanw]

White's students were very much in tune with Sheeler's commercial work and Sheeler had a solo show at the ART Center, which White helped found. Sheeler combined with Bourke-White, Martin and Rotan, all White students, as well as Louise Dahl-Wolfe to compare and contrast with Group F/64 in 1934 at an exhibition in Oakland, California.
More interesting to compare this photograph of White's from 1898
http://www.photographymuseum.com/whiteprotomod.html
With something of Sheeler's like this from 1950
http://www.moma.org/collection/objec...bject_id=52622

[Bill Burk]

...about the AIPAD show..

Thanks Peter Lewin.

Now you're talking! This is the kind of post that is worth reading - you have a real fresh response to seeing some fine prints.

Looking forward to more of your posts about AIPAD

[Drew Wiley]

Should have qualified that. All kinds of people in the 20's were obsessed with constructivist experiment, including Outerbride. Then in the 70's, certain color photographers got into the game. Barbara Kasten comes to mind. But what these people were doing were studio arrangements which could be altered at will
concerning shapes, lighting, etc. So they were essentially painting with their sets, then taking a picture of that. That is an utterly different ballgame than going
out into the real world and trying to visualize it as a Constructivist and peg the elements on a two-dimensional plane. The "New Topographers" couldn't pull this
off, though a few of them did understand how to pull things together or apart due to managing receding versus advancing hues etc, perhaps (rarely) modulating
these through neutrals. Then, as now, most color photographers think the game is merely to create as loud a noise as possible.

[Drew Wiley]

OK - some posts in between mine. But even that one link to Sheeler with the buildings demonstrates my point. All kinds of famous photographers have made compelling shots of highrises. We might mention Stieglitz's, Berenice Abbot's, or even AA's similar shots, none of which even have an inkling of Constructivism
(though I adopt this term in a special photographic sense). Sheeler plays the game brilliantly: What are you looking at, a two-dimensional composition or three?
It's the tension and competition between them that makes the picture so exciting, and not just the shapes and shadows.

[jp]

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.

As a child of the 1980's and 90's, I thought tan and brown were the "in" colors during Porter's heyday. The coffee tables holding the coffeetable books were sitting on burnt orange shag carpet in a room with brown wood paneling floor to ceiling. Appliances were brown and pollywog colors. Colors that belonged outdoors, not in. Cars were brown faux wood with two tones of baby sh**. Is my understanding of late 60's and into the 70's popular colors accurate?

[Drew Wiley]

Has zero to do with that, JP. Porter's sense of color was probably imprinted by his original motive for learning to color print: how to reproduce the colors of birds
in their natural environment, many of which are neutrals. He had difficulty doing that; but fortuitously, the current color process, dye transfer, is perhaps the best ever in terms of managing neutrals, and good ole Kodachrome was a good match for the same task, though its sheet film career was over long before Porter's. Color trend are halfway forecasted, and halfway mass-marketed. I knew the head of the international color commission back when I did color consulting. It was basically an international conspiracy where psychologists and paint mfgs and fabric and fashion gurus all got together to try to steer everyone down the same road. Minor players weren't welcome and had to guess what the big boys were up to. The louder the trend the sooner people got tired of it (listening, Fauxtoshoppers?). But other fashions are cyclical. Avacado green was big in the 50's and early 60's. People were utterly sick of it for a long time, and
now it's back in. Haberdasher mauves and purples were really cool in the 80's, and now the very thought of them makes people disgusted. But they'll return.
I don't think Porter had interior design in mind for even an instant.

[Drew Wiley]

(Interrupted... gotta do my job and not just post). But yeah, 70's were big on browns. I had a hand in that, meaning a fair amt of pull with paint mfgs in terms of
getting at least our West Coast concept of natural colors into mass production. It was all a spinoff from that whole "back to the land" ethos. Take an old car battery into the woods so you can at least power a light bulb and your Creedence Clearwater album; build a log cabin along with some PVC irrigation for some illegal foliage for income, and raise your family in the purity of nature. Urbanites who didn't quite have the stomach for drinking raw goat's milk at least wanted to pretend they were natural too. But back I might have accidentally sold a big color print or two which dovetailed into that kind of color scheme, but my game was really to modulate the impact of hues by bouncing them between complex neutrals. It's the difference between color and merely "colorful". How color is perceived depends on relationships, not just raw volume. In this respect, less can be more. What tastes good is not dependent upon how much sugar you use.
Too much and you can't taste anything. That's why some jackass like Lik doesn't understand the first thing about color. You want stunning color - study Rothko.
Almost no clearly definable hues, but a helluva impact.