Ansel Adams

[epeddy1]

This is the ugly side of art. People make it their mission to undercut those that have come before them or those that they envy or dislike. I don't love or hate Adams but I respect his body of work.

I don't have much of an opinion on Adams. I love landscape work, and his stuff is good, but I'm no art buff. But in general I often see "popular opinion" get trashed by people who are simply trying to demonstrate and prove their knowledge on the subject. In other words, they take an opposing position from the most popular just so they can sound smart anytime somebody expresses the popular opinion. You can identify when this is going on (vs just somebody having an opposing opinion because that's how they feel) when they express their opinion as fact, with evidence, and belittle whoever shares the popular opinion and attribute it to ignorance. This is a failure of logic, because an opinion cannot be either correct nor incorrect except in one's own mind.

Internet Sociology/Philosophy 101

 

[Gavjenks]

I don't know anything about the history and politics and he may very well have screwed over all of us in terms of how photography is labeled and viewed as art or not, sure.

But just looking at his process and end products, calling him "just a technician" is absurd. He clearly had an excellent artistic eye, applied both in choosing and taking shots and in artistic darkroom editing. His photos are not anything close to how the scene simply looked accurately in a purely technical sense. They are perceptions and interpretations, not taken to the extreme of impressionists, but certainly further down that road than most photographers I know.

Whether or not he promoted all of that in a productive or healthy way is an entirely different question.