Is Half Dome is a joke God played on photographers ?

[Ed Burlew]

Well isn't this just so much fun, To say that landscape photogos know they are failures is just so much rubbish, plain and simple rubbish. So dispensing with that rather rude insult to one type of photographer, lets look at photography in genreal.

Photography is a two dimensional representation in an chemical reaction( OK digital too ) for a breif part of a second( I ignore reciprocity failure, or any failure) as focused by a lense to limit the field of view. Well of course that will not represent the whole experience of a mountain or a leaf. The photo is a microcosm. The mind of the viewer is what really brings a photgraph to life. The famous masters of photography are able to bring to life our imaginations so we can tune into the photo and remember or contrive an experience that has meaning. I do not conjecture that the meaning will be good or bad, but the most popular photos are usually pleasant.

The miniscule moment in time and the limited view of the horizon taht the captured image portrays is tha clue to our mind's eye which is stimulated and creates the rest of the experience by retrieving memory o just letting the imagination contrive the rest of the reality. What is fun about large format is taht more detail is available for the mind to assimilate and then to process and work with. This conveys a higher sense of reality. Clearly a watercolour landscape image painted on paper can please the eye and mind but has less detail. I guess that too would be a failure. I guess too that a portrait photo or painting would be a totoal failure by the first author because the person aws not able to be heard, touched, smelled etc....

So the photo is the key to unlocking the eye of the ind that completes the image. I will go out on a limb and compare it to a fragrant smell that also unlocks the imagination or memory to trigger a response.

The response to a photo is a widely varied as the truth.

ED

[Doug Paramore]

Neal: It must be the season that brings all these great thought- provoking posts to our forum. You mention Ansel Adams and his great shots of Half Dome, etc. Thinks of this though...when you go to photograph Half Dome, you have one or two days, you take what lightings conditions nature throws at you, and do the best you can. Ansel lived in the park for years. He was shooting in his own back yard. If the light wasn't right, he could go home and drink coffee until conditions improved. That doesn't take away from his photography, but it sure makes things easier. As for me, I live in the coastal plain of Alabama, where there aren't any hills over a couple of hundred feet and certainly no great vistas stretching for unlimited miles. Yet, I have make some good photographs by concentrating on the small segments. I feel that I have make people look at our area with a new appreciation. I am not a world famous photographer, but my work sells reasonably well at the art shows simply because I work hard to show that our part of the South has a beauty of its own. I would be as lost photographing the Western parks as Ansel was when he tried to photograph the South. As for Weston's pepper series, he got a lot of flack, including some from Ansel Adams, for photographing "vegatables". Have you priced a pepper print lately?

As photographers we can't always capture the overwhelming beauty of great scenes, but we can intrepret and sometimes show things the average person would never notice or think about.

Regards,

[Barry Trabitz]

Do we photograph a scene or do we create our emotion that we experiance upon viewing a scene. If a viewer of the photograph experiances an emotion ( not necessarily the same emotion as the photographer) then the photograph is a work of art. IMO. I dont know if it was Westons intention in his peppers and shells to express the emotions these images create in me as the viewer, but these are among the most erotic works of art I have ever seen. His nudes to me are representations of the landscape.

Adams has created a body of work that interprets the grandeur of the SW. His later prints have been described as Wagnerian. I would perhaps use Beethovans (th as a better example. Some of the earlier prints aare more reminiscent of the 6th symphony.

Some of us photograph our feelings aroused by the scene before us and not the postcard image.(At least this is what we try to do- and on occassion, succeed.

[Jim Galli]

Apples and oranges. The camera lens can capture a scene with more detail than your eve can ever see. Sharp from corner to corner. Ready to be studied and enjoyed. Your eye sees a very small narrow field directly in front of you. But it can update that information a billion times a minute. Your camera only updates once. God's creation is "beyond finding out" both for your camera, and your eye.

[John Powers]

Yes, at a certain philosophical level landscape images (as do all images) fail. But it is the failures that we cultivate for they push and prod and throw us out of the comfy little rooms that we busily build for ourselves (and are built for us). I'd rather be free and failing in the attempt to look beyond the "real" than caged and surrounded by beauty. Beware! Your assumptions (or is it your audience) are leading you into a trap.

[Stephen Vaughan]

"Try again, fail again. Fail better."..........

[Ellis Vener]

I was under the impression that Half Dome was a practical joke God (using a glacier) played on a rather large piece of granite.

[Ellis Vener]

"When I go to a Museum and look at an Ansel Adams print, and mentally compaire it to simular vistas that I have actually experienced." That makes sense, since virtually every Ansel Adams image you'll see in a museum is in black & white. Reality is color.

Tuan said it best in his post, but let me add some of my early morning thoughts:

large format photography at its best, for it's practioners, is to me about spendingthe time really contemplating and being in the moment of contemplation. It is about abstracting out some aspect ofthat experiencethat i can either contemplate again later, or share with another person for them to contemplate what I saw and abstracted out.

Photography is an abstraction, not a recreation of reality. At its best all art is an abstraction that resonates outwards, a photograph is its own reality, an object to be dealt with not to be confused with reality. After all we don't expect "Hamlet" to be an accurate depiction of the Danish royal court at some point in the middle ages, or a Rembrandt portrait to be a four dimensional (height x width x depth x time) depiction of say, a Polish knight or a Dutch burgher -- so why should we expect a photograph to compete with an experience of reality.

How can any photograph compete with the realness of an experience? You are in Yosemite Valley, looking up at Half Dome: the wind is blowing, you hear moving in the trees, you see it in clouds are moving across the sky. There are all of the millions of other things going on, outside of you and inside of you; time is flowing. The photograph sits (or hangs there in front of you in your home or in a gallery. all ofthose other million of things are going on again in a seperate time-space now, you are now looking at a print of Half Dome. Maybe it was made while you were there, maybe it was made at another time by other eyes and hands and experiences, but either way you are no longer contemplating Half Dome itself, you are looking at a frozen instant (or maybe it is made over several minutes and depicts a longer passage of time - but still a particular passage of time,) seen from a particular vantage point, framed a certain way, seen with a certain intent, recorded with a particular media, reproduced a certain way, printed to a certain size, presented in a particular way, seen now by a particular set of eyes --your eyes-- processed in your mind with your own particular set of emotions (I mention this first as I believe very strongly that photography is foremost comprehended in your emotions), intellectual constructs, and imaginings.

"A higher calling"? May be, but you have to make people listen. And that is what Adams was doing with his photography. Saying "look at these places, these places should not be taken for granted, they need to be preserved, set aside, perhaps revered. I agree with you that we would all be better off if we treated all of every day life with such attention.

[Kevin M Bourque]

Ansel Adams had the good fortune to see Half Dome frequently, in all kinds of conditions. Knowing it intimately was not a problem. Rather, his challenge was to see this beautiful mountain every day and not take it for granite.

I'll be good next year, I promise.

[Neal Shields]

I think Ellis Vener?s answer has helped me most because this really was a question. I didn?t mean to be rude or insult anyone?s work. Obviously ?failure? was a poor choice of words. Photography is a hobby for me and one that I don?t spend enough time on. Someday when I retire, maybe. Most of you could drop your camera and accidentally take a better picture than my best work.

What I like about photography as a hobby, is that if forces the photographer to look at things that everyone else?s brain has been trained to ignore. Somewhat recapturing some of the child like wonder that most of us tend to lose as we get older.

I was raised in South Texas, the beauty of which I will defend to the death, but grand vistas aren?t around every corner. On a visit to New Zealand, I shot frame after frame of breathtaking vistas, only to get some of the most boring prints that I have ever seen. That pretty much got me out of the grand vista business.

What Ellis says about abstracting something out rather than trying to capture the whole may be what I needed to hear.