I can just imagine if a younger Ansel Adams started posting on this forum. Many of you would offer words of discouragement and correct his misperceptions (in-depth, using many paragraphs), tell him that his gear and technique is junk, and otherwise prove yourselves to be the superior photographer.
Nothing like kicking a dead guy when he's already been down for 22 years or so.
OK, someone go find the Yosemite series from Henri Cartier-Bresson so we can all pontificate on what a piece of s**t it was and elevate ourselves up even higher.
Having grown up in Los Angeles in the 1950's I instantly forgot who shot the pictures and was immediately transported back to a much less tawdry Los Angeles.
My second thought then was that I do exactly the same thing as Adams did here. If I get a call for photos for magazine pages, I leave the view camera at home and grab the digital. Correct tool for that job just as a Ciro-Flex might have been for 1940's Fortune.
With all courtesy and respect, I must disagree with Brian Ellis, and his opinion that Ansel Adams was "THE towering figure in American 20th. Century photography".
Although I think I know why he would make this statement, I f ind it flawed and without merit.
I am pretty sure that Mr. Ellis is what I would call an 'Ansel Adams pictorialist' and that is all well and good, but the personal bias here seems to be lacking in focus and the reality of the century of giants of photography from Mathew Brady, Wm.Henry Jackson, to David Douglas Duncan and the
giant of W. Eugene Smith...and many others.
This past weekend I have been totally immersed in research for an article I am writing. I have spent this weekend reviewing the magnificent PBS series, "American Photography, A Century of Images", the PBS production of the life and career of Robert Capa (Andre Freidman) and my new copy (DVD) of the PBS 'American Master's ' production "W. Eugene Smith, Photography Made Difficult". There might be more specific PBS programs on photography, but I don't know of any. If anyone can suggest others, please privately email me.
Perhaps it is because of my advanced age, but I think I have seen photography 'up-close-and-personal' since the late forties. I am one of those old 'geezers' who lived and spent his most productive years of what some are now calling the "Golden Age of Photography"! I hesitate to even mention my age, since many will assume I am rocking chair handicapped. Nothing could be further from the truth as I continue to shoot and am finally starting on a new photo essay I have been researching for 18 months. I continue to be active and a 'shooter'!
Personal heroes in photography are as numerous as there are photographers. For me, ...I try to put this opinion in some kind of perspective. I see the decades of photographers in several general groups.
The first group were those who made photographs when just making a picture risked human health and when there was a certain 'wizardry' involved. Those were the Mathew Brady and Wm. Henry Jackson...and others.
The second group were those brave souls who began to document the human condition, and those photographers were given a incredible boost with the founding and start of LIFE magazine in the 1930's. Those were the Robert Capa's the Dorthea Lange's (early) and the W. Eugene Smith's...and others.
The third group were those who influenced the start of the Golden Age of photography when photographic illustration changed how we live and purchase things in everyday life. Those photographers would be Bert Stern, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and others..including the staffers at LIFE and the growing prestige of the shooters at National Geographic.
I'm not sure there is a forth group since television began to replace the influence of the printed still image, with the zoom lens on a TV camera....and the importance of the printed 'still' image lost market share, although still being important in today's world.
From my personal story, I have been blessed by the experience of sharing dinner with two of the 'great's' in my own pantheon of photographic heroes. The first was Ansel Adams in 1956, when he was in Hawaii shooting for the annual report for Bishop National Banks (Honolulu) and the second was W. Eugene Smith, in Denver in the mid 1970's not long before he died. My impressions on Adams, was that he seemed uneasy and like a fish out of water, shooting commercial illustration. My secret impression of him was they he was home sick for Yosemite. With Smith, it was different. Huge ego (deserved) and suffering from the beating he took at Minamata, Japan.
Before anyone starts to judge who were the greats in a century of photography, we need to view the context in which our opinions are formed. Today, many will offer a personal opinion about the 'greats'...based upon today's world and our national psyche and our present day value system. We forget that, which was the 'national psyche' at the time the photographic work was made.
On this delightful 'forum' many, if not most, are what I would call 'pictorialists'. That's fine, well and good and even great since this 'niche' market my save what is left of silver based image making materials (read FILM) with the onslaught of the digital age.
There is more to photography than 'pictorialism'...much more.
The most successful photographic exhibition ever produced was "The Family of Man", Edward Steichen's masterpiece...in 1955, which still endures in its glory, complete....in the Netherlands.
The surge of the environmental movement with the Sierra Club and changing political and public priorities and attitudes made Ansel Adams and American hero. Well deserved, but let's not kid ourselves. Americans are most concerned with visual imagery that involves the state of 'Man' and how we related to others...be it family, death, foreign policy, wars, etc.
How easily it is forgotten that David Douglas Duncan gave legitimacy to the Japanese camera market during the Korean War conflict. Odd that the world of Nikon has come full circle since Duncan made Nikon and Canon famous, and now Nikon is out of the still camera and lens business.
When I met and dined with Adams, the world of photography thought Duncan and Smith were heroes and thought Adams was a nut. Personally, I found him fascinating and delightful.
When we start 'canonizing' those who we would put in our pantheon of heroes in the world of photography we need to pause....and consider the times in which their work was done, and the condition of society as a whole.
As I remember...one of Adams shots was in Steichens exhibit, and Smith's 'Walk Through Paradise Garden' was the closing shot,...or next to last. (One of my favorites).
In the world of photographic heroes there is room for many......as there should be.
Let's value them all, and appreciate the 'context' in which their work was done.
'Ancora Imparo. '
Richard Boulware
Richard , Please clarify what you mean when you refer to pictorialism. Because I hardly consider the members of the f64 club as practicing pictorialism. Modernist?..Yes. Pictorialist...No...Maybe I'm just not reading your post right. Stieglitz's early work was considered pictorialism but that all changed after the f64 club.
"Modernist?..Yes. Pictorialist...No"
this raises an interesting question ... they defined themselves against pictorialism, and claimed to be modern, but much of the f64 work strikes me as only tennuously connected to modernism at the time. weston was the high modernist of the group--it was easy to see the formalism and reductionism in his early work. but adams was a romantic. he did adopt the more radical use of photography-as-pure-photography that the f64 group promoted, eschewing soft focus, staged scenes, heavy symbolism, etc..
but esthetically and philosophically he was bound to the nineteenth century for most of his career. to get an idea why i'd say this, it helps to reference his work to paining. compare it to the modern work of the time: the cubists, the constructivists, the bauhaus painters, the fauves, the surrealists, the expressionists. then compare it to a romantic landscape painter like Thomas Moran. it should be obvious which camp adams belonged to.
i suspect Richard used the term "pictorialist" in a broader sense: that of using photography with the goal of making a picture ... of the end result being a pictorial object that exists for its own sake, and not as an illustration to support something else. this is what the pictorialists meant when they coined the term. and it's an often overlooked meaning of the word ... in this sense, the f64 guys were very much a part of the legacy of the pictorialists, even as they rebelled against so many other things that the pictorialists stood for.
With regard to the questions of pictorialists and"...ist's...and ism's"! paulr is correct in that I meant it in the larger sense. Frankly, in my opinion....all this ...ist's and ism's, is a whole bunch of bull s**t, only hiding the fact that most using these people using these terms never made a really fine photograph in their whole life. For these people, they would rather use the elitist language and be thought of as 'insiders' and something special. Being a very well educated man with many awards for photographic excellence, ...but a very plain spoken man...all this "ism's" talk is just a bunch of crap. Read pictoralists to say: Just another boring landscape photograph.
Enough already!
"Being a very well educated man with many awards for photographic excellence, ...but a very plain spoken man...all this "ism's" talk is just a bunch of crap. Read pictoralists to say: Just another boring landscape photograph."
Having started off a photojournalist (well actually starting of long ago doing police Scenes of Crime - SOCO - photography) I can well understand your fondness for Smith and Capa, and Lange et al (though being a Brit my pantheon is a bit different)
Bit in your opinion, is there such a thing as a non "boring landscape photograph".?
Or are are you of HCB's opinion that "The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks"
You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn
www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog
"Being a very well educated man with many awards for photographic excellence, ...but a very plain spoken man...."
Richard, no one could have said this about you better.......than you did yourself.
Tim Atherton: If your question is...Have I seen any really fine landscape photography? ...Then the answer is ...'Damned straight'. My old classmate David Muench has done some, Ansel did some, and there are many others. HCB's comment was appropriate for his time when the world was in conflict and there were higher priorities....like life and death, freedom and slavery. I think your making the mistake and the point my original post emphasised. All work ( and commentary must be viewed in proper context.) ... otherwise it may be wrongly and inaccurately summarized and understood. At the time, HCB was correct, in my view. Today, perhaps not. EVERYTHING IN CONTEXT...Please.
"but the personal bias here seems to be lacking in focus and the reality of the century of giants of photography from Mathew Brady, Wm.Henry Jackson, to David Douglas Duncan and the giant of W. Eugene Smith"
Of course, Brady wasn't a 20th Century photography (whatever the "century of giants" of photography means?) And Jackson was really a 19th Century photographer, despite reaching 99 in the 1940's.
Agreed on Smith, but Duncan is really one among many equals.
Unfortunately the needed perspective and context is so skewed by subjectivty as to be just one person's list based only on their own life experience (albeit the experience is apparently long)
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