I have lived through some pretty interesting times. I was deeply influenced by Weston and Adams. But irony of ironies, I at the time lived 10 minutes south of one of the other Great Saints of photography, and never knew it. I can't believe I didn't go visit this man before he died.
Over the weekend I found a 1941 printing of William Mortensen's Mortensen on the Negative.
I read through his materials carefully and can't for the life of me figure out what St. Ansel and Newhall found so offensive. To me, anyone who writes
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Dedicated to the real photographers of the world - to those who, with their second-hand equipment and their makeshift darkrooms, are today fighting their solitary battles with their recalcitrant medium, not for money or for glory, but because they would rather make pictures than anythying else in the world.
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can't be all that bad. This is exactly how I see it.
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