Ansel Adams
What I love about this clip of Ansel, apart from how modest he is, and seems like a really easy going chap, is how open he is about his art.
He explains how he manipulated his images in his dark room, and how he liked to ‘visualise’ the scene before he took it. Essentially, the negative for Ansel was the starting point in creating his ‘visions’, and to look at the negative printed verbatim would have been an uninspiring experience. He coined the phrase ‘the negative is the score, and the print is the performance’.
Now what gets me is that there are a load of folk out there who think manipulation of the image is lying. And that it’s a relatively new thing since the digital revolution came along, but If you listen to Ansel, you’ll realise that manipulation of the image has always been there, and it’s part of the creative process of photography. Sure I love it when an image comes together that requires no alterations, but I do like to put my own ‘art’ into my work, as do many photographers.
Ansel was very forward thinking and he embraced the (at the time) forthcoming digital revolution. He thought it was exciting and it would lead to new possibilities. He was a purist in the artistic sense and was no dictator of what should and should not be acceptible as art.
Thanks for posting that, Bruce. I hadn’t seen that series of interviews. I loved the quote: “bracketing is for people who don’t understand what they’re doing”! I only wish I was that confident/good to say that.
Mark
Comment by olwick — 20 October, 2008 @ 7:28 pm
Hi Mark, Yes, I hadn’t really watched that very last bit so it came as a surprise to me also. But then again, he came up with the Zone system, and if you have read his books – the Negative, and the Print, it’s clear that he would know the dynamic range of a scene by using a spot meter, and decide which part of the scene would be placed on zone v.
I have a friend who is a black and white photographer and he says you expose for the shadows and print for the highlights. Negative film has a much larger dynamic range than a digital sensor or slide film, and highlights clip nicely in film-land. But loose shadow detail and you’re a goner!
I think it’s great that he talks about photography being an emotional concept. That’s pretty much how I feel about it too. I can’t often explain why I decided to capture an image or what it means to me, but the image has something for me, and means something. That’s why I get so fed up with listening to folk going on about some new DSLR…. it’s meaningless. Photography is about something deeper than that.
Comment by Bruce Percy — 20 October, 2008 @ 8:40 pm
If I was a hacker, I would post this video on the home pages of forums like DPreview’s…
THANKS for sharing this link, one of Adams’s books changed my life 4 years ago.
In one of his interviews he said:
“Family and friends all told me:
-Don’t give up the piano, the camera could not express the human’s soul!
So, I only answered that words:
- The camera can’t, but probably the photographer could…
Comment by Vladimir Donkov — 22 October, 2008 @ 4:43 pm