> And I know I'm going to get some sh*t for this but if Ansel Adams were around
> today with the equipment he had then nobody would give a damn about him or know
> his name. I have met many photographers who produce better photos than Ansel
> Adams and that would not have been the case if they had been photographers back
> in his day.
Fred:
May I be the one to start the grief fest?
In his day, Ansel Adams was a photographer of great controversy. It was a time of urban and
industrial realism. Great photographers - mostly from the Eastern US - took pictures of
soaring smokestacks or brooding workers. They smugly looked down on their predicessors;
the pictorialists who used soft focus and hand coating to imitate painting.
Adams, and his fellow Californians including Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock and Imogen
Cunningham and their non-urban images were a direct challenge to the New York art
establishment. By the fifties, the New York crowd had embraced the westerners but still didn't
quite see them as equals.
Today, America's backroads and backcountry is flooded with nature photographers, but like
their predicessors, the art establishment pays little attention to them and I can't blame them.
Sure, their work is beautiful, but does it really add to our collective vision in the same way that
those first Ansel Adams images - the legendary "Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras" - did?
We all know the drill; sharp focus, smooth tones, beautiful, natural light, and big prints. Let's
remember how special the sight of these was in their time but let's not confuse technique with
artistic accomplishment.
(What does this have to do with stock photography? Absolutely Nothing!)
Brian Yarvin
Author, Educator, Photographer
http://www.brianyarvin.com
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