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Thomas Edison was an incredible inventor; ahead of his time.
Thomas Edison was an incredible inventor; ahead of his time.
Adams was an incredible, first-rate A-hole. He set photography as an ART form back maybe 50 years, and reduced it to little more than a craft. He merits very little adulation as anything but a good technician.
William Mortensen: A Revival: The Strange Case of William Mortensen - Photo.net Education Forum
50 Watts
There are a lot of people in history who have accomplished great things that have forwarded mankind in one way or another... who also happen to have been *******s, bigots, Nazi sympathizers and more. In fact, in my experience, most of the people I know who have accomplished truly amazing things, are generally the folks who are going to piss off somebody or another at a cocktail party. While what they do outside of the space they were innovators in may make us question their person, it doesn't mean we must also depreciate their contribution.
There can be a lot said to commend his work, but unless it clicks with the viewer, it is simply another body of work. There are lots more works to consider.
There, I fixed it for you. Let the battle begin! HahaNikola Tesla was an incredible inventor; ahead of his time.
So I guess Adams is the Salvador Dali of photography? His work is great but he was a jerkface in real life lol
No, more like Joan Miró i Ferrà. Dali was an artist on a higher plane, IMO.
I don't believe in 'arguing from authority' or in 'art' as some coherent thing that one person can affect too much. When I see the same technique and vision practiced now as it was 50 years ago, that's not art, that's just replication of a safe behavior - and it's not artists doing that.
AA was attractive to me, for the most part, because he gave me an insight into controlling a process that, at the time, I had very little control over.
For a long time, I though of AA as a master in seeing things and thought that his iconic photos were typical of his work.
I never really wondered why I didn't know more of his photos than Moonlight Hernandez, Bridalveil Falls and a few otehrs. What was clear to me that he was succeeding in capturing and displaying things in a way that most others before hid had not. But very quickly I became certain that I was not interested in copying his techniques to make perfectly managed images of 'things' and I left it at that, still holding him in some repute.
Several years ago the Corcoran in Washington, DC, hosted a large traveling show of AA and, as a matter of course, like Catholics going to Mass at Easter, I went. It was a stunning revelation for me. There were a very few of his 'masterpieces,' but they were scattered in a large collection of perfectly made but totally unexciting, uninteresting pictures of rocks and cacti and hills.
In a display of compulsive behavior he lavished exactitude in composition and processing control that the actual subjects didn't warrant. To me, not every subject deserves the same degree of attention and care; doing so, elevates the process over the content.
To me, this is what characterizes too many people, particularly in photography; the certainty of technique and procedure in pursuit of perfection totally replaces the uncertainty of artistic vision.