New discovery: Ansel Adams' urban landscapes of LA

[paulr]

I'd probably agree that Ansel was not a great editor. he often trusted other people's opinions to the exclusion of his own--not just on editing but on his artistic direction. i'm not the first to suspect this is responsible for the general decline in quality of his work in the 1950s and 60s ... which is not coincidentally his period of greatest populary.

the gallerists egged him to do more of what sold, and he happily went along with it.

as far as commercial work, that's bread and butter. it's an arena where making the client happy counts a hundred times as much as satisfying your own needs for expression. if they want crap, crap they get. i pay the bills as a commercial artist myself. i'm writing this as i take a break between the morning crap and the afternoon crap. luckily, unless something goes horribly wrong in the universe, i don't have to worry about any of this ending up on a museum wall with my name on it after i'm dead.

[Bee Flowers]

>>>RB: I have seen enough to know which ones stand up over time.

It's good to know we have a true expert in our midst.

So, basically, Ansel just didn't know how to hold the camera straight when it wasn't sitting firmly on a tripod, right?

[tim atherton]

"So, basically, Ansel just didn't know how to hold the camera straight when it wasn't sitting firmly on a tripod, right?"

That's what the darkroom is for don't you know.

At least now we know that answer to "would Ansel have used digital" - he would have had to in order to correct everything...

[Richard Boulware]

">>>RB: I have seen enough to know which ones stand up over time."---You are taking that sentence out of context. I have seen enough AA to know which ones are good and which ones are not. Too many feel like glorified postcard pictures, and in some cases, bad postcard pictures.

"It's good to know we have a true expert in our midst."---Bee, are you offended that I am looking carefully at the pictures, or thinking and writing about what they mean in the greater aspect of his career?

"So, basically, Ansel just didn't know how to hold the camera straight when it wasn't sitting firmly on a tripod, right?"---there is still the problem of knowing where to stand.

"Client happy counts a hundred times as much as satisfying your own needs for expression. if they want crap, crap they get."---I wouldn't say that a client would ever want crap. But I do think that they rarely want to pay for outstanding work---crap is cheap, which is probably hy there is so much of it out there. The other thing to consider is if they really know what outstanding work is, hopefully the client gets an art director that knows what the hel they are doing (which includes knowing what is possible for the photographer to do). but that is another subject and has little to do with these pictures.

[Richard Boulware]

"a couple of those pictures, including the first one strike me as succesful. i'm not interested in the magazine pictures, but i rarely am. (i don't see the one of the van de kamp bakery you mention)."

Paul, I believe we were looking in two completely different placed and at different picture. After looking at the rerpduction of the magazines I can say that cropping certainly saved his pictures. The last two on that webpage a good. The one of the hot-dog stand being better (the powerlines in the top left corner make it). The "shot" of the bowler's rear end is a happy accident.

The couple kissing has a Weegeeish flashbulb quality to it. The man in the "home front" series is clearly Cole Weston (which explains the cats . . . )

[Bee Flowers]

>> or thinking and writing about what they mean in the greater aspect of his career?

Well... *everybody* knows what they (don't) mean in the greater context of his career. Nobody'd even seen these pictures in a half century or so.

[paulr]

"Paul, I believe we were looking in two completely different placed and at different picture."

i was talking about the pictures here: http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/006189.php

[Robert McBride]

Well, everyone has to make a living. I think that there is some historical value in these pictures. The guy selling magazines looks like Jack Ruby.

[Mark_3632]

There is a reason those images are in the library and most probably the same reason they were donated. They are snapshots of what is not there anymore. Libraries very seldom take donations off the street, they most often search them out. Considering the amount of crap they wade through and the limited amount of space they have they have to be very choosy. Not to mention what the big ones will pay historically important images. There is a lady in this area whose husband was the son of a photographer. Ths guy is a total no name but, according to this woman when she decides on the institution that will get her father-in-laws negs she will never have another money worry for the rest ofher life. It is what he photographed that is important not who he was or how good the images were. I would bet the subjects are what was important and why these AA images are in the library. So if one gets off their high horse and looks at the images for what they are, all of the images are quite meaningful.

[Brian Ellis]

I think it's unfortunate that it's become fashionable in certain "fine art" circles to dump on Adams. It's kind of like "if he was so good, why is he so popular" or "if you can understand what he was doing without getting an MFA how good can he be?" The fact is that Adams was THE towering figure in American 20th century photography. From his photographs and their influence on the general public not to mention thousands of photographers, to his use of photography for environmental purposes, to the zone system, to the inception of the first photography department at a major U.S. museum (MOMA), to Aperture magazine, to Group F64, to the idea of photography workshops - whether you like his photography or not doesn't matter. The fact is that there was very little of importance happening at the dawn of the acceptance of photography as a fine art in America in which Adams didn't play a leading role. At a time when there was no such thing as a university photography course or photography workshops (until he started one), Adams' lectures around the country and his instructional books were one of the principal sources of knowledge and inspiration to several generations of American photographers. Read, for example, what Harry Callahan has to say about how he got started in photography. I think it's totally ridiculous, not to mention ignorant, to point to some obscure contact sheet made in the course of a commercial job as an example of Adams' supposed ineptitude.