Hyperbole Super Bowl: Wynn Bullock versus Ansel Adams
... and the winner is ... you decide
Wynn Bullock: Stark Tree
Ansel Adams: Tetons and Snake River
Hyperbole Super Bowl: Wynn Bullock versus Ansel Adams
... and the winner is ... you decide
Wynn Bullock: Stark Tree
Ansel Adams: Tetons and Snake River
Bullock rocks!
I voted for Wynn Bullock but it isn't a fair contest. A.A.'s body of work is greater and grander but the very first high quality reproduction of a perfect (!) large format landscape I ever saw was Wynn Bullock's "Horsetails and Log, 1957."
That was in 1962. I was a smart-alek kid interested in the arts and I was reading the big photo books in the Toowoomba Municipal Library. Turning the page brought up Horsetails and Log. I had no idea a photograph could be so good. It still gives me goosebumps to think of it.
Photography:first utterance. Sir John Herschel, 14 March 1839 at the Royal Society. "...Photography or the application of the Chemical rays of light to the purpose of pictorial representation,..".
Saint A is wonderful, and when his content and print quality merge he's great.
But there is an emotional quality of Wynn Bullock that goes much further.
Adams and WTF are tied! How sad.
Bullock was fantastic, especially his way with models like his daughter, if you know what I refer to...but to me it is like comparing apples and oranges. I love them both. Sometimes I feel like an apple and sometimes I feel like an orange. Both are pretty good.
I see nothing to compare. They were two masters who used film and printed gelatin silver. Where is the fight?
Frank says they are apples and oranges and Merg says they are the same, nothing to compare. Hummm, interesting.... I probably have more in common with Franks point of view. Their esthetics are very different in some fundamental ways, but they also have a lot in common. For one thing, they both employed hyperbole, Bullock's is more otherworldly, ethereal. Adams use is more theatrical in nature (ha ha). Anybody think there is a connection between the hyperbolic and modernism? Is hyperbole a modernist trait? Maybe. Would anybody say Crewdson is hyperbolic?
Ah, we're slowly reaching the keyword: "Hyperbole"
Shorter Oxford: excess, exaggeration
1 (Rhetoric) A figure of speech consisting of exaggerated statement, used to express strong feeling or to produce a strong impression, and not intended to be taken literally.
2 Excess, extravagance.
It's a tie! Not that I'd fold up the Wista and leave if a shot like either presented itself! Not that I could ever achieve the result!
But they are both packed to the gunwhales almost to sinking point.
Regards - Ross
After thinking about it, I can't see any basis for choosing one over the other: they're both outstanding images.
I suppose I'd be lousy on an exhibit jury...
Mike
Politically, aerodynamically, and fashionably incorrect.
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