I was perusing Life magazine's site, and I came across a gallery of their covers. Guess whose photograph made it onto Life magazine? Ansel Adams. Was it a landscape? No. Still life? No.
Click and find out.
Know any more like that?
Printable View
I was perusing Life magazine's site, and I came across a gallery of their covers. Guess whose photograph made it onto Life magazine? Ansel Adams. Was it a landscape? No. Still life? No.
Click and find out.
Know any more like that?
Thanks Brian, you won a chuckle from me!
Below, I’ve added a young Ansel – plus the 1938 Life cover in your link.
Well, my main reaction is that no photographer – especially those under assignment – takes good pictures with every click!
Life’s caption says:
“Come, America, and celebrate Christmas with … a lutist. (Shortly after this cover ran, the photographer stopped taking pictures of lutists and began photographing Yosemite. His name? Ansel Adams.)”
Hmm. Seems that Life is slyly distancing itself from its own poor editorial decisions, even though they rank this cover as one of their very worst ever.
Well, he was terrible at shooting people.
All those tree pictures, no wonder his portraits looked so, so...wooden.
I'd hire him as my lab tech anytime, though. :)
Anthony Hopkins should star in an Ansel Adams movie...
The candles really make the photo.
Come to think of it, the Life cover does remind me of one of those 17th-century Caravaggio paintings of an Italian subject in dramatic candle light.
Except Caravaggio would never place the candles where they look like they’re burning the subject’s fingers! Is she wincing in pain?
BTW, I thought that was Joan Baez. Wrong era, but hot fingers indeed.
Actually it looks like a bad Mortensen photo.
Well, that illustrates perfectly the dangers of working professionally. Not only do you get to take assignments that do not play to your strengths, but then an editor chooses the final image, often without your input. And 73 years later, it's still there to be seen with your name on it. At least LIFE paid well.
Of course Adams was a working commercial photographer for much of his life so he made the photographs that his clients wanted. He didn't come into the big bucks until Bill Turnage took over his business affairs, which IIRC was in the early 1970s. I'd bet there are worse photographs than this one from his pre-Turnage days out there somewhere.
Ansel Adams did very fine but utterly boring photos for many colleges and some industries. He also did the early giant Kodak Coloramas. He was probably the equivalent to a high-end annual report photographer, made a good living from it in the 50s since he built that nice house in Carmel - and even then it couldn't have been cheap.
The University of Rochester has a nice collection of his images from his work with them. They are very well lit and composed, much better than average, but pretty sterile and boring all the same.