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

[Jmarmck]

When I setup a shot I am not thinking, "what would Ansel do." I use the tools available and my own personal experience and knowledgebase to drive my decisions, not AA, Weston, or even my mother. I am fairly ignorant when it comes to the works and contributions of the "Greats". I am also inexperienced in many aspects of photography. But I do know what I like when I see it. Capturing it on film is a life's endeavor, an impossible goal. I will use the tools at hand at the time to make my attempts to capture an image, right or wrong, conventional or off the wall. AA et. al are not in my head like some disciple trying to please the master. Learning by reading and personal experience is.

[John Kasaian]

I don't quite get exactly what it means to fight or embrace Ansel Adams. I think Ansel would get quite a chuckle out of that one!

[paulr]

This question really forces us to consider what "influence" means. To what degree it has to be conscious, and to what degree unconscious influences may be even more powerful, since they go unquestioned. Consider David Foster Wallace's Fish Story:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

We're all swimming in water. Many waters. Some of us may be more or less aware that it's there, that it has qualities which determine our every move.

Theorists like Harold Bloom spent their professional lives thinking about the issues of influence. Bloom's question concerned, primarily, how to be aware of the water and how to do more in our artistic lives than be swept along by it.

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.

[fishbulb]

The weakest position of all is to say you have no influences. ... 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.

Yeah, I hear every now and then and always have a chuckle about it. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants...

[paulr]

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants...

And goofballs, and advertisers, and pulp writers, and propagandists, and pop stars ...

[Bill_1856]

[QUOTE=fishbulb;1229999]
* he got an education and was able to write well, and could move in the right circles/QUOTE]

He had an 8th grade education, (barely), and was thrown out of several elementary schools due to his hyperactivity.

[Vaughn]

All I can say is that I am kinda thankful I did not know about Ansel Adams much when I was first photographing...that influence came after I had already started to develop a way of seeing. But I grew up with two large Carleton Watkins prints on the walls...talk about influence!

[fishbulb]

He had an 8th grade education, (barely), and was thrown out of several elementary schools due to his hyperactivity.

But relatively speaking, he was decently educated. From 1910-1920, when Ansel was school-age, only 60%-65% of 5-to-19-year-olds even attended school at all. During this time, only 10-to-20% of them went on to graduate from high school. [source]

Anecdotally, my grandfather (about a decade younger than Ansel) only had an eighth grade education as well, but taught at a community college for 50 years. Education requirements and expectations were a lot different back then.

[Drew Wiley]

I never even saw a real AA print until one day when I was sneaking out of one of my own gallery openings in his own town (Carmel). So there's goes that "influence" nonsense. I had pretty much already found my own groove. Despite growing up very near Yosemite, my parents never wanted me walking into Best Studio because of all the little ceramic chipmunks and so forth meticulously balanced right on the edges of the shelves, precisely so little boys like me would knock them off. Only my older brother went in there to see prints. And when I got older, I never spent anytime in Yosemite Valley, but always headed into backcountry. I did get to see a number of authentic EW prints when I was young. But I cut my teeth on color printing anyway, and only learned black and white due a tough spell financially, because it was so much cheaper than printing color. Nowadays I kinda find myself more and more attracted to b&w.

[Andrew O'Neill]

The first book I ever read on photography was in '92, AA guide to photography, by John Schaefer. I had been taking b/w snaps with my Pentax K1000 for 4 years before buying it. I learnt a lot from that book. Had no clue that one could have so much control over the process. I never was a landscape photographer, unless there's an interesting piece of architecture in a landscape, though... but still, I am influenced a bit by him. Most of us are.
Have you ever looked at someone's work and thought to yourself, "wow, that person was obviously influenced by AA"?