ansel adams, wildlife photography and photo manipulation ethics for your consideration if you so choose. I have been kind of pondering photo manipulation and editing beginnings as it pertains to documentary photography as you might have guessed. Long read but fairly interesting with a lot of renowned names in it.
Photography in the Age of Falsification - The Atlantic
excerpt
"EARLY in its history photography was dismissed as a lesser art, or as no art at all. A photograph, critics said, was just a record of the external moment -- a critique that the medium has never entirely escaped. Well into this century photographers found themselves apologetic about their work, and many were drawn to the abnegation of pictorialism. The Pictorialists produced blurred, symbolic, "poetic" prints in an effort to be painterly. The style was in vogue until the 1930s, with intermittent reinventions afterward. In 1932 a group of seven West Coast photographers, among them Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston, found themselves united in their distaste for the vapid ethic and misty look of pictorialism. One evening in Berkeley, at the house of a member of the group, Willard Van Dyke, the seven debated what they should call themselves. An eighth photographer, a visiting neophyte named Preston Holder, suggested "US 256," which was then a designation for one of the smaller lens stops -- a constricted aperture allowing for the clarity and depth of field favored by the group. Adams worried that as US 256 they might be mistaken for a federal highway, but he liked Holder's drift; he picked up a pencil and sketched out "
f/ 64." The aperture
f/ 64 corresponded to US 256 in a new marking system just introduced. The seven photographers liked the graphic elegance of the name -- the flourish of the long descender on the
f Adams drew. They became Group
f/ 64. The members believed in straight photography, in "pure" photography -- in what Adams called "clear images, smooth honest papers, and ... the complete absence of affected imitation of other art forms." They held their first shows, and the public quickly saw, with
f/ 64 clarity, that the group of seven had found a better path. Pictorialism withered, and straight photography flourished."
guys. so i guess the moral of the story is only follow legit new organizations.
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