Hi folks,

The medium is not the message. All that counts is the perception by the market place of the worth of a particular work.

That 'preceived value' is a delicate balance of a great many factors which may or may not have any relation to the image, its mode of capture, or its presentation.

The mythical figure of 'Ansel Adams' was an engineered and manipulated development of the real Ansel Adams. Hype, and Will Turnage's marketing skills, took a formidable artist and exalted him to the stellar status of being the 'Super Model' of photographers. That is not to take anything away from the man's vision and skills, but he was a length ahead of the rest of the field by the time 'Art' photography became acceptable and collectible in the 1970s/80s.

The efforts of the 'A. A.' machine certainly generated a great legacy for photographers and for the 'fine-art' photography market. Ansel himself, I believe, saw photography as an evolving entity: his acceptance of smaller formats in his later years, his expressed fascination with the possibilities of what would become digital capture and imaging. Salesman Ansel might have argued the toss over formats but I somehow like to feel that artist Ansel was less bogged down by such puerile constraints. Had the Hasselblad and modern films been around in the 1920s might he have opted for a lighter load on his treks? Who knows? Who cares, what's more?

To argue the merits of any photographer or his oeuvre based on the real estate of the materials he worked with is blasphemous and ridiculous. One of the greatest philosophers of all time never left a written word of his own thought to posterity. In fact, the only recorded instance of Jesus Christ ever writing is at the stoning of the prostitute - and then he writes in the sand ... hardly an enduring medium. Yet his thoughts have influenced the course of Western history and thinking for two-thousand plus years.

If the choice of film format adds to the communication of a message or idea well and good, but it should never dictate the value of the message. The message in any communication is all that matters.

Walter Glover