Ansel Adams and Walker Evans

I just finished a fascinating biography of Walker Evans by Belinda Rathbone first published in 1995. It was the second biography I had read about him the other one being written by James R. Mellow and published in 1999. The James R. Mellow work was written with much more detail, perhaps a little too much detail but unfortunately the author died before he could finish it. He covered Evans life from his birth in 1903 to 1956. Evans went on to live another 19 years of a very interesting life. He was also lucky enough to live long enough to enjoy his recognition as one of Americas most original photographers.

Ansel Adams is certainly Americas most well known photographer. He spent a lifetime perfecting his technique and teaching it to others in workshops and in his books. His basic photography series 1-5 which has been in publication since the 40's explains in great detail his approach to pre-visualizing the landscape to determine exposure, proper film development and finished print. It's a wonderful guide to learning the techniques of fine art analog photography. He believed in the well crafted print and subject matter worthy of the time and effort to make that print.

Evans also worked very hard to produce the beautiful finished print and like Adams he worked with an 8x10 view camera but what they chose to preserve could not have been further apart. Adams loved the dramatic and pristine natural landscape untouched by civilization. Evans was fascinated by the cluttered human landscape the essence of civilization.

Adams and Evans were born the same year but thought little of each others work. Evans on Adams; "...disappointing. His work is careful, studied, weak Strand, self concious, mostly utterly pointless...Wood seasoned, rocks landscapes, filtered skies. All wrong." Adams on Evans; "I think the book is atrocious. Just why the Museum (MOMA) would undertake to present that book (American Photographs) is a mystery to me. Walker Evans book gave me a hernia. I am so goddam mad over what people from the left tier think America is."

It's an oversimplification but I believe Adams was more photographer then artist and Evans more artist then photographer. Adams believed in the medium of photography itself and his photo-secessionist movement, the F-64 group, was about conquering the medium and fully understanding the physics, the chemistry, the architecture of camera, light, film and print.

Evans was more about using the medium to illustrate a point of view.

http://www.creativesynthesis.net/blog/2007/07/11/calligraphy-and-the-camera/

The Photography of Don Hong-Oai. Born in Vietnam in 1929 he died in the U.S. in 2004. I was given a calander last year of his work primarily done in China. Here is a link (you need to scroll down a bit to get to the text). This is so pure it breaks your heart.

Eugene Atget (1857-1927) I'd like to introduce in my blog photographers that I feel inspired by. Atget mostly wandered the streets, parks, graveyards of his home town recording images of what interested him. Fortunately for him his home town was PARIS, FRANCE. I believe Walker Evans said of him that he followed his own agenda rather then trying to create work done in the style of that time. He also liked to photograph trees which are one of my favorite subjects. He didn't seem to be very interested in people for subjects and many of his cityscapes seem to be devoid of citizens as if he was all alone. I like that quality in his pictures.

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932). When I first discovered a Karl Blossfeldt image I saw something I wanted to emulate in my own botanical work. Blossfeldt didn't consider himself a photographer. He taught art, and he collected plants. He made rather crude images of plants that he collected in order to use them as illustrations of design in nature for his students. His closeups of common plants, seed pods, flowers beautifully illustrate the architectural elements in biological forms. It is this scientific and academic approach to the subject that makes me admire them so much more then the flower images of Georgia O'Keefe. I read a quote by O'Keefe that she painted flowers because 'their cheaper then models and they don't move.", Blossfeldt photographed flowers because he saw something monumental in common flowers and "weeds". As I understand he was drawn to the vulgur (as in common) rather then the rare and unusual. Here is a portrait of the man himself, an example of his work, and my own crude attempt to emulate his technique.

Diane Arbus
I first saw a Diane Arbus photograph in 1971 in a short article about a New York show of hers in Time Magazine. The photograph was titled 'A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970'. The square formatted image is lit by a circle of light from a single flash that darkens the corners and gives the illusion that one is peering through a peep hole on to something private and hidden. The picture reveals an enormous man crouched over as if constrained by the room itself peering down at two smaller people; a man and a woman. The giant is out of proportion with everything and everyone in the room capturing a surreal moment within a real photograph. The effect is unsettling and disturbing. Her image is so personal and unique a perspective that it cannot be duplicated. To look at a Diane Arbus photograph is to see something that can only be revealed by a Diane Arbus photograph. Like an image taken with film that records light outside the visible spectrum it reveals a world that is before us but invisible to us.