Szarkowski on St. Ansel

[paulr]

Interesting interview from a few years ago, when Ansel Adams at 100 came out ...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/196180/104-5504208-6981500

[Kirk Gittings]

"Ansel was cordial even to the penniless, unknown photographers who showed up at his doorstep. Bill Turnage has told me that every night--every night--there were photographers at his home at cocktail hour with photographs for him to look at. He was a terribly kind man......." My experience with him exactly.

[Oren Grad]

Lots of good and thought-provoking ideas in there - thanks for posting...

[darr]

"His landscapes aren't about geology; they're about weather." John Szarkowski

What profound insight!

Thank you Paul for the post.

[Bruce Watson]

I wasn't going to say anything. I wasn't. I don't like Szarkowski - I think his understanding of photography decays rapidly as you leave the confines of NYC. So I was just going to be quiet.

But that quote "His landscapes aren't about geology; they're about weather" sums it up my problem with Szarkowski. He misses the point completely - Adams' landscapes are about natural beauty and how Adams felt about it. I'm not terribly surprised that Szarkowski doesn't get it; it occurs outside of Manhattan.

[tim atherton]

"He misses the point completely - Adams' landscapes are about natural beauty and how Adams felt about it. I'm not terribly surprised that Szarkowski doesn't get it; it occurs outside of Manhattan."

Well - Szarkowski is from the midwest and is still very much a prairie boy at heart. He has also spent much of his "time in Manhattan" actually on his farm and orchard in upstate NY - much of that photographing trees and the land.

In my few conversations with him, Szarkowski has never seemd to have any problem "getting" natural beauty - which aspects of my work are about and certainly much of his own personal work is as well.

[paulr]

Bruce, Szarkowski is not trying to sum up a man's life work with one word (be it geology, weather, or beauty). As Michael points out, that statement came in the context of a larger point--an interesting one, I think.

That whole interview is really just a sound bite compared with the essay he wrote in the Ansel at 100 book (which has more depth than anything else I've seen on Ansel's work).

For what it's worth, Szarkowski came to New York late in his life, by way of rural Wisconsin and Minnesota. He was a dark horse candidate for the job at MoMA; a country bumkin compared with anyone else under consideration, or anyone else who has held the post.

It's one thing to say you disagree with him. To say "he doesn't get it" might come off as a little presumpuous. Szarkowski worked with Ansel for decades. I'm not sure what your claim to the final word is.

[Robert McClure]

Gentlemen,

Threads like this one are the kind that make me proud and pleased to participate in this forum!

When it comes to John Szarkowski I really know only one thing. I owe my discovery that I had the hard-wiring to love, practice, and appreciate photography after stumbling across his "Looking at Photographs" in the 80's.

Robert

[Bruce Watson]

I never claimed to have the final word. Why would anyone think that I did?

I admit that I've never liked Szarkowski's work. I thought perhaps it was because I hadn't seen enough of it -- NYC is too far away. But it was the Ansel Adams at 100 exhibit that really made me question the reverence with which Szarkowski is so often treated. I couldn't easily put it into words; I'm a photographer, not a writer. But I did find an article (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200207/brower) that is fairly articulate; my feelings about that exhibit are fairly accurately echoed by the author.

Sorry I can't find a link to the whole article. It's the copyright owner's prerogative not to show it I suppose.

[Tom Westbrook]

> "His landscapes aren't about geology; they're about weather." John Szarkowski

Wasn't it Beaumont Newhall that started the thing about how Ansel included more of the sky in later photos? Seem to remember that from a some book read years ago. Maybe in the History.

[paulr]

"I never claimed to have the final word. Why would anyone think that I did?"

Well, when you say that someone like Szarkowski "doesn't get it," the presumption is that you do get it. It's one thing to disagree. It's another to suggest you're privy to the truth and to declare that someone else is wrong. It just happens to be extra conspicuous when the person you say is wrong is one of the more respected people in the world on the topic.

[paulr]

"But I did find an article that is fairly articulate; "

the link says the full article is only available to atlantic subscribers. can you quote the passages you're talking about?

[Conrad Hoffman]

Don't know beans about Szarkowski, but if you want to know AA better, read his autobiography, then read "Ansel Adams Letters and Images 1916-1934". IMO, AA wasn't complicated, and his own words and interactions speak pretty clearly.

[paulr]

i enjoyed his autobiography (i have a beautiful, hardbound copy that i found on top of a dumpster in brooklyn ... who knows). ansel's words and ideas are indeed not complicated and are a pleasure to read. i find they lack the depth and insight that szarkowski brings to the subject, though ... especially concerning how his work fits into the larger traditions of photography and american landscapes.

it's also often true that artists aren't the most trustworthy critics of their own work. there's the automatic lack of anything like objectivity, and then there's the evident reasons they chose to communicate their feelings in pictures, not words, in the first place. for extreme examples, look at some of the bizarre statements made by Cartier Bresson, or William Eggleston.

If I'm looking for insights beyond what I see in the pictures, I'm going to look for help from someone who can shed brighter (and less colored) light than these two have done. I think szarkowski has done a better job in this case than adams did (just as he's done for weston and for stieglitz and quite a few others).

[William Mortensen]

I've always admired the insight, intelligence, and clarity of thought and word Szarkowski brought to photography through his writing. While what he sees is not always what I see in an image, I can almost always appreciate what he sees, and appreciate the image more having read his analysis.

It's also quite nice to read the work of a well-respected art critic and understand a sentence after reading it just once. (As opposed to "The neo-post-modern radicalist reinvention through didactic deconstruction of the underlying image/object inteplay allows the creator-destroyer symbiosis of an artist's ego/id conflict to dissect Wittgenstein's underlying theorum that "that which can only be shown cannot be known.")