Brian, I noticed the same error in crediting Minor White as a co-inventor of the Zone System. It was, as you note, while Ansel was on the faculty of the Art Center School in 1942 that he and Fred Archer developed what was later to be known as the Zone System.
I find this hang up on Ansel Adam quite ridiculous. It seems like reading some of you, that he is the ONLY photographer past and present. Yes, he had had an important role in photography once, however he wasn’t the best by any means. Even though this might sound a heresy, but there are many contemporary photographers better than he ever was. By all accounts Ansel Adam has made about 50,000 negatives and all of those about a dozen are noteworthy. I really like some of those handful, but they are definitely not the Alpha and Omega of printmaking.
Sorry, I meant to say that he is definitely not the Alpha and Omega of photography. There are many others!
Why is it that when people show their adoration of someone like Ansel Adams or Edward Weston or Steiglitz or Steichen etc ad naseaum that people despise these opinions. Michael Smith gets the same kind of comments of adoration and he deserves it. So does Adams. The have earned it. The have all done their time and they have impacted photography tremendously whether you like it or not. If you dont like Adams just say you dont like him. Please refrain from telling people that they are wrong to adore or that it irritates you. That is just plain mean and quite frankly it is not your place to tell people how to think.
Now you are really going down the scale by mentioning Michael Smith’s fame as an (?)artist(?) which is dubious at best.
The key is ad naseaum here (re. AA). One shouldn’t be an ostrich with his head under the sand and reciting the mantra of the greatness of one. Instead, be brave and discover someone contemporary who might be better than the “Old Masters”. And yes I like Adams, but still he is not the best by a long stretch!
I thought this quote from AA's autobiography (written @1980-83) might be of some interest to the discussion: "In the electronic age, I am sure that scanning techniques will be developed to achieve prints of extraordinary subtlety from the original negative scores. If I could return in twenty years or so I would hope to see astounding interpretations of my most expressive images. It is true that no one could print my negatives as I did, but they might well get more out of them by electronic means. Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression".
Personally, I think he'd be loving photoshop if he were around... Some here may think that this type of speculation is silly and pointless, but on a day not conductive to photography like today - 15 degrees, snow, high wind, etc, - I can't see the harm in itI'm just glad to know that I'm not the only one who considers these things occasionally!
www.markminard.com
Mark dug up the quote I kept thinking of which leads me to believe he probably would have, but the theme of this thread seems to be:
“Why would anyone care if Adams would use digital?”
It may not matter in day-to-day living, but it goes directly to the point of what various tools and techniques do to what we produce. Scanning is not the same as enlarging. A scanner and printer is not just a new-fangled enlarger. When new technology comes along things change. Marshall McLuhan talks of the car not being a new horse and buggy, but something that is a fundamental change – he called it Rear View Mirror thinking. So it is rear view mirror thinking to think that if Adams used Photoshop his work would change only in efficiency. To use the literary metaphor – which is perhaps more transparent – did writing change with the typewriter or word-processor. I’d say fundamentally.
As for Adams, his work is so open to discussion because his prints are the epics of our time. He is the Milton of photography. Would asking if Milton’s work would fundamentally change if he used a wordproccesor be silly? I don’t think so. Milton is not so far off topic – every photographer should read Milton’s “On His Blindness” and every photographer should mull over the line “When I consider how my light is spent”. (http://www.sonnets.org/milton.htm#002)
I don’t know how it would be different, but Adam’s work would be fundamentally different if he used Photoshop, just as the horse and buggy is about more than 40MPH difference, and a word processor would never allow Milton to use 18 line long sentences
Can you see it? Epic/8X10? Paradise Lost/ El Capitan? We yammer on about this dead guy because his work deals with epic issues and we wrestle with him whenever we walk into a friend’s house who has half a wall covered with a picture of El Capitan. Maybe he’d only have had to make one shot of the darned thing if he could have Photoshopped it.
Dean
Dean Lastoria
"and a word processor would never allow Milton to use 18 line long sentences"
Utterly off topic - but an image dropped into my mind of James Joyce attempting to get "Finnegans Wake" past the spellchecker in Micros*t Word...
Dean, good post. I got about 25% of the way through Paradise Lost before I couldn't take anymore. But of course the best lines are near the beginnning "The mind is its own place - and in itself can make a hell of heaven - a heaven of hell". Paraphrasing, of courseTry getting the old english spellings of "heav'n", or "he'vn" thru the spelchekur!
With a new house, I'm struggling with this decision right now - do I build another darkroom or do I buy the Epson? Since my ultimate goal is to someday produce a book of my work, I'm not sure it really matters.
Probably my favorite article dealing with the digital/traditional discussion is this one fron The Atlantic, titled "Photography In The Age of Falsification". It's well worth the read for those of you who haven't seen it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98may/photo.htm
"Maybe he’d only have had to make one shot of the darned thing if he could have Photoshopped it".
Apparently he was sometimes questioned about whether or not "Moonrise" was a double exposure - as he felt the need to state that "it most certainly was not" in his book Examples, The Making Of 40 Photographs... I imagine that upon seeing a similar photograph taken today, my first thought would be "nice photoshop". The double exposure question pales in comparison.
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