I first got interested in photography in middle school, in the 1970s. Some friends showed me there was a small darkroom at the school, and they showed me how to develop film, and how to make enlargements. Of course photography was totally different then, from what it is now. Taking pictures now is so easy, since we all carry around a camera in our phones. The image quality and color is astonishing, and high quality images that can be sent around the world in a second take almost as little effort as breathing.
I don’t want to pretend that photography back in the 1970s was some arduous process. It wasn’t strenuous, like shoveling coal or digging ditches. But if you were into photography you quickly became enamored of working in the darkroom. Mixing chemicals carefully, pouring them into shallow trays, working with glow-in-the-dark timers as you swished sheets of paper in the various solutions, was a major part of photography in those days. And if you didn’t like that stuff, well, you didn’t stick with photography very long.
But photography then was a very finicky thing. There were lots of steps, and a lot could go wrong. You had to figure out the exposure, and then you had to set that on the camera. And you had to focus the camera—that wasn’t an automated process then. Then once you took the picture, there was the delicate art of devoloping the film, to make a negative. Then you enlarged the negative, in the darkroom, to make a print. And every step could go wrong. Really wrong, or just a little wrong. But each step compounded previous mistakes. So by the time you got to the end of the process, you frequently didn’t have all that good a picture.
In those days, getting a picture to “come out” was the big challenge of being a photographer. If a picture “came out” it looked pretty good by the time you were done with it. And as you got better at photography, more of your photos “came out.” When you got to the stage where most of your pictures looked technically decent, you were pretty much a professional photographer.
Anyway, there was a cadre of famous photographers, whose pictures not only “came out” but they looked really polished and special. People like Harry Callahan, Richard Avedon, Minor White, and Irving Penn.
Well, Ansel Adams was at the top of this heap. His photos were the most technically refined, and they were frequently of spectacular subject, frequently awesome natural scenes, like those found in National Parks.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, he really dominated photography. Most of the prints sold in galleries at that time were by him. His photos—usually B&W—were everywhere. Calendars, books, magazines. You practically couldn’t go into a bookstore without seeing an image or two by him.
I got to meet him when I was a teenager. He had a show at a gallery in Birmingham that my brother took me to, and Adams was there, and I got say hi to him. That was a big thrill for me at the time! Like a music fan meeting Frank Sinatra, or a baseball fan meeting Mickey Mantle.
Anyway, my photography—and most everyone else’s—got away from Ansel’s style of work. Spectacular landscapes fell out of favor—probably because it would have been so hard to top his! A more inward, self-reflective kind of photography took hold. And people got very dedicated to establishing their own, distinctive style. As time went on, most photographs stopped looking like they were made by Ansel Adams.
Mondrian’s work has been a big influence on me, and my approach to art. When I first encountered his paintings, I was struck by how spare, flat, and organized they were.
Ansel Adams
I first got interested in photography in middle school, in the 1970s. Some friends showed me there was a small darkroom at the school, and they showed me how to develop film, and how to make enlargements. Of course photography was totally different then, from what it is now. Taking pictures now is so easy, since we all carry around a camera in our phones. The image quality and color is astonishing, and high quality images that can be sent around the world in a second take almost as little effort as breathing.
I don’t want to pretend that photography back in the 1970s was some arduous process. It wasn’t strenuous, like shoveling coal or digging ditches. But if you were into photography you quickly became enamored of working in the darkroom. Mixing chemicals carefully, pouring them into shallow trays, working with glow-in-the-dark timers as you swished sheets of paper in the various solutions, was a major part of photography in those days. And if you didn’t like that stuff, well, you didn’t stick with photography very long.
But photography then was a very finicky thing. There were lots of steps, and a lot could go wrong. You had to figure out the exposure, and then you had to set that on the camera. And you had to focus the camera—that wasn’t an automated process then. Then once you took the picture, there was the delicate art of devoloping the film, to make a negative. Then you enlarged the negative, in the darkroom, to make a print. And every step could go wrong. Really wrong, or just a little wrong. But each step compounded previous mistakes. So by the time you got to the end of the process, you frequently didn’t have all that good a picture.
In those days, getting a picture to “come out” was the big challenge of being a photographer. If a picture “came out” it looked pretty good by the time you were done with it. And as you got better at photography, more of your photos “came out.” When you got to the stage where most of your pictures looked technically decent, you were pretty much a professional photographer.
Anyway, there was a cadre of famous photographers, whose pictures not only “came out” but they looked really polished and special. People like Harry Callahan, Richard Avedon, Minor White, and Irving Penn.
Well, Ansel Adams was at the top of this heap. His photos were the most technically refined, and they were frequently of spectacular subject, frequently awesome natural scenes, like those found in National Parks.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, he really dominated photography. Most of the prints sold in galleries at that time were by him. His photos—usually B&W—were everywhere. Calendars, books, magazines. You practically couldn’t go into a bookstore without seeing an image or two by him.
I got to meet him when I was a teenager. He had a show at a gallery in Birmingham that my brother took me to, and Adams was there, and I got say hi to him. That was a big thrill for me at the time! Like a music fan meeting Frank Sinatra, or a baseball fan meeting Mickey Mantle.
Anyway, my photography—and most everyone else’s—got away from Ansel’s style of work. Spectacular landscapes fell out of favor—probably because it would have been so hard to top his! A more inward, self-reflective kind of photography took hold. And people got very dedicated to establishing their own, distinctive style. As time went on, most photographs stopped looking like they were made by Ansel Adams.
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