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Thread: Ansel Adams remastered

  1. #1
    Land-Scapegrace Heroique's Avatar
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    Ansel Adams remastered

    Most of us are well-aware of Ansel Adams’ enthusiasm about the newer “electronic” processes emerging in his later years:

    "I eagerly await new concepts and processes,” he says. “I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them." (From his 1981 book, “The Negative”)

    Had he lived longer, few of us doubt whether he would have explored his vision by digital means – and clearly not at the exclusion of film.

    But this leaves me curious.

    How might he have applied these “new concepts and processes” to his older work – not the potential work before him, but the “finished” work behind him. And not just through digital means, but also through newer traditional means that may also have begun appearing late in his career – modernized enlarging lenses, updated film & paper emulsions, new chemistry, etc.

    Did Adams ever indicate – directly or indirectly – how he may have manipulated “old” negatives or re-done “finished” prints this way, in an effort to better achieve original aims, technical or artistic? Perhaps quoted evidence to make inferences?

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    Re: Ansel Adams remastered

    I met a photographer that studied under Adams back in the 1980's. He said that Ansel was aware of contrast masking of negatives and the benefits inherent in that practice but he considered it more involved than he wished to engage in.

    Maybe he would be in the midst of PS if he had lived long enough.

  3. #3
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: Ansel Adams remastered

    This resembles another sheer speculation thread about AA posted a bit ago. But I look
    at it this way, except for a brief stint under contract, he didn't get involved with color
    photography, so in this respect was decidedly a traditionalist. After awhile your vision
    and working practice get married and comfortable, and you get stuck in that groove.
    Except for some early work, AA style was pretty much the same throughout his life -
    cold-toned realistic prints from the darkroom. Zone system. No split toning, no warm tones, no color, no combined images. One accidental "black sun". And really, not much state of the art gear, unless you want to call a Zeiss lens from the era something like that. Who needs photoshop when you can just erase some hillside graffiti from a negative? I think the gadgety technophiles are telegraphing way too much of their own wishes into this hypothesis. Why not ask what digital camera Atget would have used?! (Let us be glad that his images - which are as sophisticated as any done now - were made with a virtually archaic process in his own lifetime!)

  4. #4
    Dave Karp
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    Re: Ansel Adams remastered

    Well, we don't have to speculate. He did reprint old negatives over and over. And the interpretations changed. As time went on he used newer materials, which also had an impact on the photograph.

    John Sexton related an incident when Adams popped out of the darkroom with a print, and exulted that he finally came up with an interpretation of a print that he was happy with. It was a photo that he had taken many many years ago (I wish I remembered which one).

  5. #5
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: Ansel Adams remastered

    All I was implying was that there was a time when Adams was considered backwards because he wouldn't embrace color photography and stuck to what were
    considered socially irrelevant themes. Today his fame has a lot to do with nostalgia
    for the America past and how it looks in old-school black and white. And altough he
    routinely improved his prints if the materials themselves proved better, the scope of
    his style and methodology didn't veer very far off course at all. In contrast to Sarkowski, I feel he did his best work in his 60's, not his 40's, so he certainly wasn't
    stuck in the mud. But I find it ironic how those who seek an answer to everything
    through digitial options will probably just be looked upon as fuddy-duddies by the
    next generation, who will have something far more advanced than the present
    digital offerings. Good prints will still be good prints, even if the negative was made in a shoebox with a meniscus lens, or the print was made in a chicken house (like
    Julia Cameron's were). People don't necessarily change just because the technology
    becomes fancier. We adapt as needed, or if we are so inclined, take leaps of faith.
    But only a market-manipulated idiot does it just because it's the latest thing. That's
    materialism, not art. And certainly Adam's own gadgetry was not state of the art
    even when he was alive. It did the trick, and was good enough. Other than that, he
    fiddled with things a bit for curiosity or pay, but never seems to have adopted them
    into his own stylistic parameters. Perhaps the only notable exception was Polaroid
    film, but that made him a lot of money in the long haul.

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    Re: Ansel Adams remastered

    It's difficult to remember that at our present state, digital photography is still just in an early development stage. Lord knows what AA would have eventually been able to do with it.
    Wilhelm (Sarasota)

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    Land-Scapegrace Heroique's Avatar
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    Re: Ansel Adams remastered

    Thanks everyone for these comments which help satisfy my curiosity. Before posting, I did recognize that if a final image meets one’s aims, then new traditional or digital processes really don’t matter…

    On the other hand, I was curious whether processes emerging late in Adams’ career may have given birth to new aims for older negatives or prints – or inspired him to give “another go” to older work if the processes available at the time of creation had frustrated original aims or personal satisfaction.

    David Karp’s anecdote above (about John Sexton) suggests this may have happened a lot!

    I confess I know less about Ansel Adams’ biography than many others here, and this is one dimension that often captivates me...

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    Re: Ansel Adams remastered

    I would like to comment on the line about AA being considered backwards because he didn't embrace color photography.

    I was able to go to the Yosemite workshops in both 1977 & 1978. At one of those workshops, someone asked AA why he didn't shoot more in color. His answer was - that it was because "black & white was one more step removed from reality." Believe it or not, AA saw his photographs as abstractions. I think most people miss that point. (Yosemite doesn't really look like his photographs...just look at a color photograph of any location he shot & you can see how blah it looks. A color version just doesn't have the same magic. [my opinion])

    I saw the AA "100 years" travelling exhibit at the Art Institute in Chicago & remember how disappointed I was in a lot of his early images, but then realized, these were prints made on inferior products compared to today. (It amazes me that as the world goes digital, the B&W materials keep getting better...note the improvements Kodak made in Tri-X & T-Max films in the last few years. Too bad they didn't commit the same energy to their silver papers.) He did indeed print many of his negatives again in later years with the much improved materials. I think there is no doubt he would have used any material available to him to get what he wanted, once visualized by him in his head.

    Rick Tapio

  9. #9
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: Ansel Adams remastered

    A lot of people seem to forget that Adams made his living as a commercial photographer, not an art photographer. Despite his early fame in art circles, this
    wasn't a particularly lucrative source of income until he was fairly old. He did make
    quite a bit because early-on Polaroid paid him in stocks which quickly rose in value.
    But he wasn't personally rich. The gift shop in Yosemite also had income, but his
    prints themselves didn't fetch much. His working era was when black and white was
    still commercially significant. Like most of us, if he were alive today he probably
    would own a Mac and Photoshop software, just like most of us. But how much of that
    would drift into his art per se if another question altogether. Maybe he would have
    hired an assistant skilled in such things, maybe have ignored them completely.
    Late in his life there were wonderful papers around like Seagull, Galerie, Brilliant, and Portriga which are all now gone or changed. He used a couple of these. Other fine papers have come along. But to call the newer ones "better" might raise a lot of eyebrows from some of the old-timers. Certainly VC papers have vastly improved.
    But if Adams had decades of evolving darkroom skill, and apparently enjoyed darkroom work, and was working with a lot of old negatives anyway, why would he
    switch to a whole new technology just for the hell of it?

  10. #10
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: Ansel Adams remastered

    Not to beat this humorous topic to death - but as I was out on my walk I thought of
    all the revolutions in photography which AA largely ignored. Today things like inkjet
    are the newest craze and generate a lot of buzz. But over Adams lifetime there were
    all kinds of things in both still and moving images which, from a functional standpoint, were just as revolutionary as anything going on now. Some like Kodachrome and dye transfer had nearly a 75 year history, so were certainly formidable. Adams talked about all kinds of things, including how to apply the zone system to color exposures (I don't know anyone who does this- somebody might), and the coming electronic age of image-making, but he ended his career exactly the way he began it in his youth - expose the paper, dip it in the developer, stop, fixer, wash it, dry it. There were of course a number of minor tweaks to this over the long haul, but all the big revolutionary developments during that same long career never entered his own practice. Other than the slight detour into Polaroid, he was
    amazingly static, especially if you compare him to someone like Steichen. Even his
    black and white technique was predictable. It worked for him, so why change?

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