The photographs of St. Ansel, a different POV

[Bill_1856]

Has everyone missed my point? The discussion was not about the quality or the progression of his printing, but about how one could see in the images, even the somewhat somber ones, his excitement and/or joy in making the photograph.
Think of him spotting the Moonrise over Hernando, and nearly ditching his car to get the picture. Even 60 years later, it's still exciting to read his matter-of-fact description. But you know he was nearly peeing in has pants!
Or waiting for what must have seemed hours for that beam of sunlight to illuminate the horse over lonseome pine -- and then it happened.
And Jesus H Christ -- those Aspins -- oh mein Gott! I can feel the excitement as he snapped the shutter!
And on and on -- his best work! You can feel what he felt! His Mania is contageous!
John Szarkowski said it on the video: "He will be remembered because, on a good day, he was a great artist!"
Can't you feel it? I can!

[Michael T. Murphy]

Funny stuff about Barrow. As far as I knew he hated my work right up to the time he started using examples in his history of photography in New Mexico lectures

I am sure he has respect for your work or he would not have included it his history. It *is* a real compliment to be included – congratulations!

I have a great respect for Barrow. I just think you and he are from different “tribes.”

There are these wonderful lineages of influence in “American” photography that seem, to me, almost like dharma transmission in Buddhism. I wish we had better biographies of some of the major players from the 1960’s and 1970’s like we have for Weston, Adams, etc.

In photography, Barrow’s lineage comes through the more intellectual side of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Nathan Lyons, and the Bauhaus in Chicago. (Lyons was the one who hired him at George Eastman House.) He was also strongly influenced by broader art concerns, including Warhol and conceptualism, of course (which, in my mind, always flows back to Duchamp.)

Mirrors and Windows/ Beatles and Stones/ Hearts and Minds/ Intellectualism and Romanticism? It is hard to try to set up a dichotomy that we can use as a framework, without one “side” feeling the other is elitist, condescending, or irrelevant. There are these incredible works in different lineages, and they each tend to include their own signature accomplishments and dead ends. (One area where I get confused in my own categorization is keeping the love that many photogs have for the technical aspects of photography separate from a more intellectual approach to the content, making, and interpretation of an image.)

But then there are these incredible new fusions or syntheses. Like Mark Klett and Robert Adams, whom I *think* are core to the “3rd generation of landscape photographers” that Kirk mentioned in another thread (re: a quote from Van Deren Coke.)

I'd be interested in any references or frameworks, like Mirrows/Windows, that folks think do a good job of separating out the contemporary lineages in American photography (though the frameworks always wind up being inadequate, it is at least a start )

Best,
Michael

[paulr]

Mirrors and Windows/ Beatles and Stones/ Hearts and Minds/ Intellectualism and Romanticism? It is hard to try to set up a dichotomy that we can use as a framework, without one “side” feeling the other is elitist, condescending, or irrelevant.

szarkowski once suggested that american photography could be seen as existing between the poles of walker evans and edward weston .. walker's work being about ideas, and weston's work about pleasure. basically a cerebral/sensual dichotomy.

it's the one large point of his that really confused me, though, as i find great sensual pleasure in evans' work, and lifetime worth of ideas in weston's ... and i feel that each has taken some individual pictures that could be mistaken as work of the other.

i assume he wrote this before he'd seen (or been forced to accept) the more purely consceptual work of the 80s and 90s, which can sometimes make evans look like a hedonist.

at any rate, i'd agree there are people who are heavily biased towards or against work with a cerebral component. but i know people who love work that's built almost purely on sensual and esthetic foundations who have problems with work that's merely pretty. there's a difference between work that deeply explores formal or other esthetic concerns, and work that shows us nothing but familiar and superficial versions of prettiness. this is one of the things that ansel clones get accused of, and what some accuse ansel himself of, concerning work he did at some points in his life.

[Henry Ambrose]

Has everyone missed my point? The discussion was not about the quality or the progression of his printing, but about how one could see in the images, even the somewhat somber ones, his excitement and/or joy in making the photograph.
Think of him spotting the Moonrise over Hernando, and nearly ditching his car to get the picture. Even 60 years later, it's still exciting to read his matter-of-fact description. But you know he was nearly peeing in has pants!
Or waiting for what must have seemed hours for that beam of sunlight to illuminate the horse over lonseome pine -- and then it happened.
And Jesus H Christ -- those Aspins -- oh mein Gott! I can feel the excitement as he snapped the shutter!
And on and on -- his best work! You can feel what he felt! His Mania is contageous!
John Szarkowski said it on the video: "He will be remembered because, on a good day, he was a great artist!"
Can't you feel it? I can!

Bill you must not have the correct credentials to ask this kind of question.

[Dave_B]

Let me start out by saying that I am in the "Ansel is God" camp. I absolutely love his B&W prints. Seeing an original AA print is a near mystical experience for me. His photographs, his life, his vision clearly makes him a great man in my book.
However, and I feel sheepish saying this, his color images leave me cold. They basically look pretty pedestrian. Have others noticed this and feel the same way or have I missed something fundamental about his color work? Have I been spoiled by the super saturated Velvia images that is the norm for modern color landscape images?
Thanks,
Dave B.

[naturephoto1]

Hi Dave,

Unfortunately most of us have seen too little of Ansel's color work, particularly his large format Kodachromes. My printer, Bill Nordstrom (founder of EverColor Fine Art) had the opportunity to print one of Ansel's 5 X 7?? Kodachromes I believe for the Ansel Adams Gallery. I just wish that I had had the opportunity to see the print. The same is true of the 8 X 10 Edward Weston Kodachrome that Bill had printed I believe for one of Weston's sons (not sure if it was Cole or Brett).

Also, from my understanding, Ansel was not partial to the color printing of his time. That is partially why he shot and why we see so little of his color work.

Rich

[Barry Trabitz]

At his 1980 Workshop in Yosemite. Mr. Adams, " call me Ansel sonny", commented that he had done some work with color and decided "that I was lousy at it. Several years ago i found a book of color photographs of Death Valley that he did. He was right.

[claudiocambon]

szarkowski once suggested that american photography could be seen as existing between the poles of walker evans and edward weston .. walker's work being about ideas, and weston's work about pleasure. basically a cerebral/sensual dichotomy.

it's the one large point of his that really confused me, though, as i find great sensual pleasure in evans' work, and lifetime worth of ideas in weston's ... and i feel that each has taken some individual pictures that could be mistaken as work of the other.

i assume he wrote this before he'd seen (or been forced to accept) the more purely consceptual work of the 80s and 90s, which can sometimes make evans look like a hedonist.

at any rate, i'd agree there are people who are heavily biased towards or against work with a cerebral component. but i know people who love work that's built almost purely on sensual and esthetic foundations who have problems with work that's merely pretty. there's a difference between work that deeply explores formal or other esthetic concerns, and work that shows us nothing but familiar and superficial versions of prettiness. this is one of the things that ansel clones get accused of, and what some accuse ansel himself of, concerning work he did at some points in his life.

I think that to sketch the range of photography as having to exist between any two poles is the problem. It's not one of Szarkowski's finer moments, unfortunately.

I will stage the variation between Adams and Weston instead as temporal. I have always seen Weston as someone obsessed with contemporary art. I see Braque still lifes in his close-ups of rocks and kelp, Matisse in some of his nudes, the machine-obsessed angularity of modernists in general in his incredible taut graphic sense of composition. Weston feels very 'Modern(ist)' to me, very much of the 20th century.

Although Adams is never one-dimensional (his surf sequence is pretty hip, for example), I see Bierstadt most of the time when I see his work, meaning a more 19th century, more classically Romantic vision of nature and the world, one where the vastness of natural spaces is the logic, not the insistence of geometry as the Platonic formal skeleton showing itself everywhere, or the stronger use of metaphor that equates a pepper with a fist, or an artichoke heart with a vulvular hood (bless Edward's heart!). I think that our contemporary tastes tempt us to see Adams as outdated, because part of the modernist baggage is this sense of superiority over its precedents. This is more a function of our relative tastes than we may care to admit.

This thought came to me as I was forced to reevaluate the work of two artists near and dear to me: my grandparents, who were both painters in Italy in the early to mid 20th century. My grandfather was older, and more steeped in 19th century style and rhetoric. Although I had always respected his talents, a lot of what he did had often struck me as outdated in comparison to his relatively younger wife, whose work through the early 1970's (my grandfather died in 1930) was certainly more contemporary, and as a result felt more artistically genuine.

Recently a monograph was published of my grandfather's work, and I was surprised to find that many of the things I had found stilted about his work had with time acquired a mere historical character. In other words, the artistic force was undeniably there, and I saw that what I originally hadn't liked about the work originally was not essential to its now more cleary manifest artistic core; it was merely a stylistic choice that had acquired its own sense of historical relevance and place, and which was part of its substance, not a detraction thereof.

I think that Adams will be viewed very differently in, let's say, a hundred years. I think there is a good chance that his prominence as an educator and pioneer and activist will fall slightly into the background, and people will look more just at the prints than at the shadow of his persona that tends to influence peoples' perception of his work (in my mind) too much. His stylistic choices will be viewed as different from, for example, Weston's, but perhaps not with the same value scale applied to the judgment that we often bring to it today. In otherwords they will not be viewed as a detriment to the substance of his pictures, but as an integral part thereof.