on a lighter note: Summer Camp w/ Uncle Ansel? Everyone is drunk (even the 12 year olds) singing and dancing around a raging fire. Hide your daughters.
on a lighter note: Summer Camp w/ Uncle Ansel? Everyone is drunk (even the 12 year olds) singing and dancing around a raging fire. Hide your daughters.
Ha, I saw his photo series that he did for the University of Rochester and it was flat out some of the best commercial work I've ever seen, and it would be a winner today as much as in the 1950s. He was a great "set-up" corporate location photographer. He also did masterful Kodak Coloramas. Certainly the people posed stiffly but that was partially due to technical resttraints
His studio photos were OK for the day, but photographers back then seemed to photograph far too many eggs!
I never thought his Manzanar photos were up to the standards of a typical Life magazine photographer though. He simply didn't have the PJ mindset. Then again, we're trying to compare him to the finest photo-journalists of his time, even though he only did these assignments on occassion.
It's really unfair to judge him based on some random trashcan selections.
I've photographed dumber stuff and made more errors... editing is what makes a pro a pro.
Searching for old contact sheets by famous photographers doing down and dirty jobs... The modern equivilant will be some sleuth Googling a contemporary photographer (or anyone) and discovering all their stupid posts on various Internet forums...
Frank, You're right about not judging...
I just spoke with Ansel and he wants to remind everyone that every photographer has a bad day... or a few bad days. In fact, he remembers these photos and says he was testing some new film in a new camera. These were random grab shots and were not intended for publication.
Furthermore, Ansel claims that he never specfically authorized these photographs for public release and he's a bit miffed that they are being publicly disseminated. He's okay with the criticism, but would like everyone to understand the context in which they were created.
He said the reason the Van de Camp shots were so poorly composed is because one was taken when he was hungry and rushing to get some of their pastry, and the other was taken after he ate too much and was suffering from a sugar-rush. He seems to recall drinking too much coffee and also needing to find a mens room -- fast.
As we concluded our conversation, he asked me to challenge the folks on this forum to look into our own trash cans... we probably have just as many bad photos to share!
Respectfully,
Psychic Brian (who hope nobody in the future judges him by this post.)
"Searching for old contact sheets by famous photographers doing down and dirty jobs... The modern equivilant will be some sleuth Googling a contemporary photographer (or anyone) and discovering all their stupid posts on various Internet forums..."
writers in general have it bad in this regard. the minute they die, eveything is up for grabs. publishers are so hungry to cash in on anything unpublished, they don't bother making distinctions between a writer's most prized work and his laundry lists.
kafka suffered this more than anyone. in his will he asked his best friend to destroy much of his unpublished work and his unsent correspondence. the friend didn't; now we have retrospective compilations of his work that throw it all in together: masterpieces, unfinished stories, letters he never meant to send, notes, mistakes.
i understand refusing to destroy his papers ... maybe you could argue that the inherent interest of his work outweighs his posthumous right to privacy. but god, at least label things for what they are. if it's an unfinished story that he asked to have destroyed, put a note on it that says so.
i've seen similar things in photography. paul strand prints at a gallery in new york that would give strand a heart atack if he knew they were going to be displayed. clearly a case of people raiding the shoe boxes under the bed looking for profit, without regard for the artist's legacy. and ansel: how many decades did he support himself as a hired gun? there must be mountains of sheer dreck with his stamp on the back. can't blame him for paying the bills.
but for artists in general, one thing i think holds true most of the time ... if all your work is succesful, you might want to ask if you've fallen into formula. the great creators and innovators in any medium often fell, and fell hard. not every experiment works out, especially the risky ones. if you don't see evidence of this as a viewer, it probably goes back to what Frank said about the professionalism being in the editing.
here's another one
http://www.providencephoenix.com/art/tripping/documents/04922663.asp
i don't think i agree with Richard; 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). i'd agree that walker is better at this kind of thing, but then again, he's better than anyone at this kind of thing.
the link i just posted is more of a formal modernist take ... it crosses over with weston more than with walker. you might say weston was better at this kind of thing .... but likewise, weston was better than anyone at this kind of thing. doesn't make it a bad photograph.
what's missing in these pictures is any kind of context set up by the photographer ... an edited presentation that tells us this is a body of work, and helps us see what it's about. we have the benefit of this kind of context and authorial intent from walker and weston. if we don't have it from ansel, it's either because it's been lost, or because he didn't care enough about the work to bring it into a final edited form. it might also be that people didn't care for it and encouraged him to do other things. he tended to follow the encouragement and discouragement of others.
"i've seen similar things in photography. paul strand prints at a gallery in new york that would give strand a heart atack if he knew they were going to be displayed. clearly a case of people raiding the shoe boxes under the bed looking for profit, without regard for the artist's legacy."
You gave me a great idea! I'm going to spend some time this weekend cleaning out my shoe boxes and getting rid of all of my out-takes. I certainly don't have a famous legacy to protect, but I like the reputation I have and it might be worth being proactive to retain it!
But then the photo researcher MFA students at the Univ of New Mexico won't have all your valuable work prints to compare with your finals and the art history world will suffer a huge loss ;-)
Whenever I go diving into the print boxes I find that I used up twenty sheets of paper to make prints that are only slightly different and it's impossible to tell which is better than the other, but at the time I knew what I was doing, I think.... Gawd, what was I thinking blowing a whole afternoon when I had it in the first 30 minutes?
And it's all archival so it will last forever...
"Ha, I saw his photo series that he did for the University of Rochester and it was flat out some of the best commercial work I've ever seen, "----That is quite a statement considering how much commercial work is out there. And where, other than the Unv. of Rochester, can we find these pictures so we can make our own judgments. I googled them and only saw 3 (a close up portrait of a football player, a environmental portrait of a prefessor and a couple of students next to colums, looking out onto the campus). They were mediocre.
"It's really unfair to judge him based on some random trashcan selections."----I am not judging him souly on these 90 or so pictures (even though that is a LARGE selection to judge from). I recall a book of his I once had. There were pictures from a New Mexico peublo and Native Americans as well as unknown landscapes. They were clearly outtakes, but it shows how many bad pictures he made. He said hat you might get 12 good ones a year if you work hard enough. I should think he meant that HE gets 12 a year if he is lucky enough. I have seen enough to know which ones stand up over time. Unfortunately there are too many bad ones compared to the good ones.
Which brings me to, "I've photographed dumber stuff and made more errors... editing is what makes a pro a pro." So why are there so many of his bad pictures out there? It would then be safe to say that he did not know how to edit. We all have shit that ends up in the trash, but that is as far as it goes.
"but for artists in general, one thing i think holds true most of the time ... if all your work is successful, you might want to ask if you've fallen into formula. the great creators and innovators in any medium often fell, and fell hard. not every experiment works out, especially the risky ones. if you don't see evidence of this as a viewer, it probably goes back to what Frank said about the professionalism being in the editing."--- I believe that is right, the successful artists continue to push what is possible (think of Friedlander), and if it is not "true" then it doesn't get finished---
" . . . LAPL's photo collection brought the information that the images were from negatives given to the Library in the early 1960s by Adams himself."---These were not pictures that were found in some shoe box. He wanted them to be preserved.
"i don't think i agree with Richard; a couple of those pictures, including the first one strike me as successful. 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). i'd agree that walker is better at this kind of thing, but then again, he's better than anyone at this kind of thing."
The Van de Kamp Bakery is the 10th picture in the series. The reason, I think Evans, and Weston for that matter, are "better" (I would rather say more successful) is because everything in the frame is considered or even intuitivly "felt" (I think the latter is the case). The lesson to be learned from both Evans and Weston is to pay attention.
"the link i just posted is more of a formal modernist take ... it crosses over with weston more than with walker. you might say weston was better at this kind of thing .... but likewise, weston was better than anyone at this kind of thing. doesn't make it a bad photograph." The modernists also thought that the photograph is a thing in itself. With that understanding there are no bad photographs, just poorly conceived pictures.
At Paris Photo I was fortunate enough to see what may have been a unique print of a portrait of a string quartet by EW. It was most likely done to make a buck since it was not reprinted for himself (I will have to check with the book from the archive to be sure). Never the less, the portrait shows the same compositional movement and wonderful print quality as his still lives from the same time. Which goes back to Franks first comment about the Rochester pictures. So much is dependant on what and how much is seen. You could spend your whole life looking at and thinking about pictures. That is one job of the critic and curator. A certain amount of looking and thinking has to be done for yourself and part of what the critic/curator does is give you a place to start or a push when you get stuck. To a certain extent, these forums do a similar thing.
"Searching for old contact sheets by famous photographers doing down and dirty jobs... The modern equivalent will be some sleuth Googling a contemporary photographer (or anyone) and discovering all their stupid posts on various Internet forums..."---I am fortunate enough that I will be able to look back and say, "what do you expect? I was 23 and trying to figure things out. Thinking and debating can only help."
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