Kinda like asking why vanilla ice cream is the best when you've never tasted any other flavor.
Kinda like asking why vanilla ice cream is the best when you've never tasted any other flavor.
I wasn't implying vanilla is a secondary flavor. Just that one needs exposure to variety to form an opinion - and my opinion is that I like a lot of different flavors,
and in fact prefer to make my own ice cream. "Best" is a pretty silly way to phrase
any of this, however, as is the notion that landscape photography is somehow static
or passe. I did find the comparison to Kincade to be severly underinformed. Kincade is a convicted con artist, but otherwise comparable to a photographer like Peter Lik.
Zero visual talent, tons of marketing savvy. I never knew AA personally. I did share
a public retrospective with a major collection of his work right after his death, and got to spend some quality time with a number of rare prints not seen for many years, specifically the largest collection of very large prints of his ever assembled.
In large scale, they weren't tack sharp like many of us could achieve today. Not the
stereotypical f/64 look. But that just made one appreciate his sheer poetic skill. All
kinds of people can copy his nominal style or technical tricks. Most of us know way
more tricks than he ever did, and have better films and papers. And he no doubt had
his share of bellyflop images, just like all of us. But a calendar photographer he was
not. He felt what he saw, intensely.
Thank you for the information, rdenney. I must admit I had to Wikipedia a couple of words, but I understand what you were saying.
Monet was once radical, now passe,
once his exhibition was shut down by police for having a nude painting in it!
shock
how passe,
the question is, how often do you stand in awe and reverence at the mystery of nature?
will nature ever be passe?
if they pave paradise and put up a parking lot then sure it will,
how many people here have done any thing to help mother nature survive her attackers?
take photos? i dont think so.
i have been jailed for stopping our beautiful old growth forests get turned into toilet paper. so others may enjoy.
are all the elements that make up your life style causing avoidable burden on people or planet?
i like ansell coz he walked his talk.
through a glass darkly...
Good post cosmic!Originally Posted by cosmicexplosion
Ansel accomplished extraordinary feats to serve society and not himself, unlike a few well marketed photographers today.
Why has calendar art become such a derogatory term? I believe some people are ignorant of nature, can't see the forest for the trees, therefore its of no human interest or intelligence since there's nothing manmade in it.
As for making a difference, I did. My photography had nothing to do with it and it may be small scale, but every bit helps. I was a founding member of a ski club that was able to get quite a bit of land set aside, in the Sawtooth Valley in Idaho, for non-motorized recreation and wintering wildlife. http://sawtoothskiclub.com/ Check the history. Not bad for some lowly ski bums.
Thad Gerheim
Website: http:/thadgerheimgallery.com
I personally despise "calendar" photography because so much of it merely caters to
stereotypes of natural beauty rather than the real thing. Fauxtoshop run amuk with
phony color saturation only makes this problem worse than ever (I have no problem with PS as a tool per se, just with its adolescent abuse). So instead of helping preserve the beauty of the natural world as it really exists, fauxtography serves to substitute a lowest common denominator of make-believe beauty - why preserve
anything if you can just create it on your computer screen at will like a Hollywood
production? AA did not behave like this. He obviously did a fair amount of contrast
control etc to interpret the way he saw natural light, but it was light indeed he saw.
If you ever spent as much time in the Sierra as I have, you can start appreciating his
sensitivity to it. And his work was integral to preserving Kings Canyon as a Natl
Park (perhaps my favorite park of all of them) and several other places. So he has a
significant place in history for more than just esthetic reasons. He was an important
pioneer in this sense. A number of brilliant photographers worked in Yosemite Valley
long before him, and I personally regard Watkins as an artistic superior; but again,
appreciate both flavors, and Muybridge especially too (another historically notable
guy, for a couple other reasons).
I agree... but whether we like it or not that stuff sells like crazy and possibly sells because lots of people actually like it, just like Kincade's art.
I hope we were making a distinction between quality and popularity.
To risk stating what most people here probably already believe, "best" in any subjective endeavor is a dubious and usually reductive judgment, but unless you subscribe to radical populism, it's not going to be measured by popularity.
Some people will indeed use numbers to suggest that Kinkaid is a better / more important painter than Richter, that Ron Howard is a better filmmaker than Goddard, that Christina Aguillera is a better musician than ... you get the idea. I just get sad when I hear that kind of argument. I don't like where it points, and I don't like the way the counter-argument makes me feel like a snob. I just wish the really interesting, challenging, mighty stuff could count on the audience it deserves.
It gets the audience it deserves, perhaps. It just may be a really small audience.
Rick "the more the power is concentrated, the smaller the target it hits" Denney
You have to sell a helluva lot of calenders to make a serious profit, and far more postcards, esp since not as many folks mail messages as they once did. And although
Kincade still apparently has a fair amt of personal wealth, his business empire has collapsed and left behind some pretty disgrunted people, to put it mildly. Guess he wins
if avoding actual prison time and merely looking at wave after wave of lawsuits for fraud is what you account as success in life. I take and print photographs for personal
pleasure, and hopefully can get some significant supplemental retirement income from it. But I'd rather do honest work at anything else rather than take photographs just
because they might sell to a sufficient number of dingbats. Might as well set up another raunchy roachy pizza parlor chain as do that. Was in an interesting gallery in
Hawaii a few days ago, but they were making plans to relocate because Peter Lik had
bought (not leased) the property right out from under them to expand from next door.
Three salesmen were in there, and real pros who knew how to take a punch. I offered
to take a Lik print if they would refund me the full purchase price plus five thousand
dollars, and allow me to hide it behind a curtain. They took it with really good humor.
Real pros. But the Fautographs were far worse than I remember them even in Vegas.
Backlit transparencies on big lightboxes that looked like very very cheap postcard scenes with Fautoshop absolutely run amuk. But obviously they were doing quite well
as a gallery, so there must be some people out there with far more money than taste.
Disgusting. But it's their money and their right to spend it, so what can I say.
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