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Thread: Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

  1. #1

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    Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

    Now here is a real curve ball. Is an Andre Kertez 35mm negative any less valuabl e or precious then an Ansel Adams 8x10 negative? Or is a 35mm negative of W. Gen e Smith any less important then an Edward Weston 8x10?

    The images these great photographers have produced have brought great joy, exhil aration, sorrow, tears to the viewing auidience for years and will continue to d o so in the future. Yet their approach is essentially opposite. Though AA used 3 5mm many times, and in his later years, used Hasselblad exclusively.

    Questions have been bantered about over what format to use, bigger smaller. Well , this is just more fuel to the fire.

  2. #2

    Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

    I'm sorry, but I don't see how this adds fuel to any fire I've seen discussed.

    While it seems kind of silly to base your format choices on how much money certain master's negatives are worth, one COULD do that. In this case 8x10 would win by an overwhelming margin. The prints of Ansel Adams - made from big negs shot in his earlier years - have outearned all other fine art photos by far.

    At one point in the 1980's, half the money spent on fine art photographs in America was for prints by Ansel Adams, and most of the money spent on Adams was on images from a handful of large format negatives.

    Andre Kertez did not share Adam's access to well heeled tourists willing to pay hard cash for prints - and even so, how many visitors to Paris in the fifties would have bought one of his prints to hang on their wall?

    Kertez worked at a time when few people imagined (especially in Europe!) that fine prints made under the artist's supervision could be a major generator of capital. He did what a smart guy in Paris at the time would do - make photography in a form that would appeal to the markets and earn himself a decent living. To him, the idea of gallery sales would have been farfetched indeed.

    I think that very few people choose a format because of the income generating potential it had for somebody else fifty, sixty, or seventy years ago, but if you were to do so, Adams won by a huge margin.

  3. #3

    Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

    No difference, not by reason of the format size alone. There's only one negative of Moonrise and only one negative of dear old Andre's picture of the skyscraper with the little cloud to the left (can't think of the title, if there is one). If the Moonrise negative is worth more, and I suppose it is, it's because the image is more famous or Adams is more famous or something similar, not because of the difference in format. -jb

  4. #4
    tim atherton's Avatar
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    Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

    It's all in the eye of the beholder and what you are willing to pay. Personally, I think Kertesz is by far one of the greatest photographers of the 20th Century and I would much rather buy (and would be willing to may more) for Kertesz's Chez Mondrian, Underwater Swimmer or Satiric Dancer than I would for any Adams photgraph. Same for Walker Evans. In my opinion (and that's all it is) I think they are more interesting photographers. I I was sat in A Christies auction, I'd be willing to pay for those. And I don't think anyone collecting in that way really cares what format the negatives are, they are buying they are buying the artistic image (unless they are just snobs with too much money) - it could be an Evans SX70 polaroid. Negative size has nothing to do with it.

    tim a
    You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn

    www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog

  5. #5

    Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

    Negative size doesn't mean anything. IT'S WHAT IS ON IT WHICH IS FUNDAMENTAL .

  6. #6

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    Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

    I've got an 11x14 neg (well, I guess technically they're called "Xrays") that measures about 150 square inches. I'll swap it for 100 HCB 35mm negs (each of which measures 1.5 square inches), if anyone's trading.

    The value of any artwork isn't determined by square inches.

    .

  7. #7

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    Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

    Seems to me much of the preceding, with which I naturally agree, really takes up the question of the relative worth of images by photographers as disparate as Adams and Kertesz--who happened to work in different formats--not the value of their negatives, which is another story. These tend to be priceless, which often means they're worth nothing at all, in economic terms. They can't be reprinted without accusations of fraud cropping up (think of the scuffle the reprinting of E.S. Curtis' gravure plates has generated in recent years), so from a curator's stand-point, they're a perpetually degrading resource, useful only for study purposes (for which, again, they're invaluable). I once asked the curator of a prominent museum photo collection what he did about negatives. "Avoid them like the plague," was his reply. It might even be argued that the value of prints of certain collected images increases in the absence of the negative, as it does in the absence of the photographer. To my knowledge, the Center for Creative Photography is the only museum collection of fine art photography that actively acquires negatives as well as prints--though there certainly are exceptions (MoMA's Atget negatives come to mind). Adams is exceptional here too: I believe he left his negs. to the Center with the stiplation they remain available to students to print from, modestly suggesting, they may as well learn from the best. At first I was stunned by this generous invitation to allow other photographers to forge potentially valuable prints from his negatives. Then I realized it was a dare--he knew full well no one could make his prints, not even from his negatives! The negatives alone are a score without a sound.

  8. #8

    Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

    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

  9. #9

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    Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

    That isn't a curve ball, just a bunch twine all balled up.

    Even as a philosophic rant it is lame beyond belief.

  10. #10
    Founder QT Luong's Avatar
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    Andre Kertez vs Ansel Adams

    If Adams made the *same* image with a Hassy and an 8x10, there is little doubt in my mind that the 8x10 would be more valuable. Since you cannot really compare the value of two different images, what format they were shot on is hardly relevant.

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