Ansel Adams: Do you fight or embrace his influence on your landscapes?

[fishbulb]

Corran - you won't be the first to eat your own words. That much I can guarantee.

Hmm. I tried to visit your website, but it's down.

It's a pity that the stupid web won't allow delicate imagery to be presented without utterly butchering it; otherwise, people could see how much of my own suite of even black and white work really is different. But for now, I've pulled the entire site. Disgusted with superficial surfers that confuse a splotchon the screen for the real deal.

Ah. It seems like we've got here is a case of "you can dish it out, but you can't take it".

Either put your site back up, or take down your attitude. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

EDIT: never mind, found it on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20131020....com/index.php if anyone is curious.

[Heroique]

But even when my tripod has literally been in exactly the same spot where Ansel once was, and I even recognized the association with a particular image of his, my camera ended up pointing some other direction, and I shot and printed something that made me think, why the hell didn't AA even see that shot?

An entertaining anecdote – exhibiting little if any "anxiety of influence."

Sounds like you broke out of the "small oppressive box" that Paul mentions above in post #53.

Your Aunt Lucia Wiley would be proud!

[Jac@stafford.net]

I am highly suspicious of posts which chant "I" frequently, in particular as the first letter of a post, and when the poster suggests that we should adopt his view. The most annoying are from that person who seems compelled to reply several times a day to the same old tune. Just this one time, just this one post let me say "Nobody cares!"

You know who you are.

[Bill_1856]

St. Ansel is a great landscape photographer. Live with it!

[Oren Grad]

It's my hope as an artist to bring something new to the party. I want to offer something that's more than my version of the same old thing. While I disagree with Bloom on a lot of points, I think there's something to the dilemma he presents. We are all unique individuals, uniquely weird ones. We have experiences and perspectives not shared by anyone else. And yet we have this tendency let our creativity be bound by these oppressive, small boxes—ones that were often built long before we were born. Why do we do that? How do get out of it? Some people don't care, but some do ...

Self-consciousness about uniqueness and originality arguably is itself a box and a flavor of conformity. If that is one's temperament, though, it might be just as well to go with the flow.

[Kirk Gittings]

As I think Robert Adams said somewhere (might be "Beauty in Photography" or it might have been in personal correspondence), photography is always new because the world we photograph is always new from moment to changing moment. But he was big on the idea that photography should be about the world and not our own petty preoccupations.

[sun of sand]

I am highly suspicious of posts which chant "I" frequently, in particular as the first letter of a post, and when the poster suggests that we should adopt his view. The most annoying are from that person who seems compelled to reply several times a day to the same old tune. Just this one time, just this one post let me say "Nobody cares!"

You know who you are.

Did this guy just abuse lff TOS?



...as well as his own dislikes?

Im suspicious of people who discount others so easily and then try to get others to join them without ever presenting anything to the contrary

Shut up is not an intellectuals method of tearing someones ideas down
Thats more an insecure person scared of saying something that anither with whom hes tried to align himself with could take issue with quickly landing outside the desired circle hes fought so wimply to attain

Kinda like a kidadult telling someone hes putting them on block


Use your buttons

[Oren Grad]

Self-consciousness about uniqueness and originality arguably is itself a box and a flavor of conformity. If that is one's temperament, though, it might be just as well to go with the flow.

Ack, apologies if that sounded dismissive. What I had in mind is that worrying about this, in this way, itself is a fashion and has a cultural history, and isn't really an escape to some privileged place where one can see the truth unvarnished.

[Regular Rod]

If you think AA's influence on how one visualizes the landscape is stale in our day and time, what is the best way for the practicing LFer to protest?

Shoot, print, and exhibit your own way? Promote the work of other artists? Wait patiently for cultural norms to change in their own mysterious way until they're more congenial to your own?

Or do you think such efforts pointless and, well, futile, since AA's most representative images communicate eternal, classic values – and will always remain worthy models for you to follow?

-----
Based on my always-limited (but ever-growing) knowledge of art through the ages of Western Civilization, I fall into the second camp on most days; yet based on what I know of AA's life and thought, it seems he'd applaud those who fall in the first camp, say "best of luck," but continue pursuing his own influential way...

We are all influenced by everything we see or experience. There is nothing you, or anyone else, can do about that, so if you, or anyone else, see Ansel Adams' images, you and they are influenced by them. This applies to everything, not just the works of Ansel Adams. Even the images of least merit (whatever that may mean) made by the lowest of the low, influence anyone who sees them. The influence may be positive or negative (again whatever those terms may mean) but the influence is there, no matter how slight it may be...

RR

[Doremus Scudder]

Doremus, Forgive me for removing this sentence from the context of your thoughtful post, so I can suggest that resisting these influences is what makes you who you are, not just accommodating them.

It also allows me to paraphrase, with greater effect, what I explicitly (and implicitly) hear in about half the replies so far:

The landscape photographer's search for autonomy is impeded by the accumulated weight of tradition.

Heroique,

The point I was making is that the "search for autonomy" is meaningless. The accumulated weight of tradition is simply the cultural milieu we grew up and exist in. The "influences from myriad sources" [I love quoting myself...] can be positive, negative, ambivalent, whatever you wish, but they still make us who we are, whether we like it or not. I don't think we're impeded by our influences, rather, our work would be impossible without them.

...
The weakest position of all is to say you have no influences. Simply by using a view camera you're profoundly influenced by Alberti and Columbus, and the other Renaissance theorists of modern perspective. If you're photographing landscapes at all, you're indebted to the post-17th Century European landscape art tradition. And to the 19th Century American painters who widened the possibilities of landscape to include uncultivated land. You can pretend your esthetic sensibilities are naive; that they emerged organically in the walled garden of your imagination, uninfluenced by the other pictures you've seen ... by what was presented to you as beautiful as a child. But I doubt this view will hold up to much scrutiny.

Paul,

This is so beautifully formulated that I had to quote it. We're all a product of our culture and its myriad influences. How we react to them is maybe less of a matter of free will than we like to think.

... Bloom's perspective is warped by his fixation on originality. Artists are not obligated to share that fixation.

I think artists steal from other artists all the time. [It is] In fact Intrinsic to art. There has never been an entirely original artist

Oren and SoS,

Indeed, an emphasis an "originality" has become the norm. For some, "original" is better than good (I heard a curator say once, "His work has too much craftsmanship, it can't be original."). What is original in art is a creative and innovative synthesis of influences and, yes, once in a while, new discoveries (technology plays a huge role here). In the past, artists, writers and composers aspired to master their craft and emulate the masters. Bach wasn't trying to be "original" in the sense it is implied today, neither was Michelangelo or Virgil; they just were, due to their "hard-wiring" and the fortunate confluence of their intellect and cultures. Even Leonard Bernstein decried the cult of "originality." He famously contended that composers were not original, the simply stole from the past and that, "If you're a good composer, you steal good steals."

Now, back to work stealing!

Doremus