I must be the only 'photographer' on the planet that doesn't 'get' Ansel Adams - I don't especially like his work, I find it dark and foreboding and wouldn't want it on my walls. I suspect that if I saw large prints, I might see them differently - small digital copies don't seem to do his original vision justice.
No, there at least two of us
I've read his books and the general advice is good, especially with respect to visualising your intended final result. He never used the invented word "previsualization", which has come into common use especially in the film industry.
Apologies if this comes across as pedantic, but over the years (starting with my dad teaching me about Adams' approach to photography and introducing me to the zone system in the field and in our basement darkroom), I've spent a good amount of time trying to understand and apply what he meant when he referred to "visualization". It's clear from his extensive writing, that "visualization" is fundamental to his overall approach. However, I struggled to feel like I fully understood it (or otherwise accepted its validity given my personal "reading" of Adams' own photography). It wasn't until I came across Minor White's refinement and reworking of the concept of "visualization" into "previsualization" and "postvisualization" that the mist around "visualization" began to clear for me.
If you're not already familiar with Minor White, l urge you to check out his oeuvre but also his writings about photography. He was a star student of Adams at the California School of Fine Arts who quickly went on to becoming a noteworthy photographer. His greatest influence, however, is probably from his photography pedagogy. He ended up replacing Adams as the lead photography teacher at the California School of Arts and then went on to a long teaching career at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He taught or influenced many of the great mid- and late-20th Century B&W photographers and authored many articles and several books.
White introduced the dichotomy of "camera-as-brush" vs. "camera-as-extension-of-vision" and broke down these two "attitudes" toward photography into five elements of how photographers go about producing a photographic print:
- Attitude Toward Surface (i.e., paper type and effort to emphasize or hide the influence of the two-dimensional presentation of the image).
- Attitude Toward the Hand (i.e., image manipulation in various forms, many of which were frowned upon by the "straight" photographers like Adams, despite their own frequent use of some forms of hand manipulation, like dodging and burning).
- Attitude Toward Composition (i.e., the influence of compositional rules and imitation of painting styles).
- Attitude Toward Visual Reality (i.e., how things like blur and filtering are used to manipulate literal/documentary capture and presentation of the photographed scene).
- Attitude Toward Creative Continuity (i.e. terminating creative activity at the exposure stage or extending it to the output stage, which was the darkroom in the film era and photo processing and editing software in the digital era).
All five elements factor into how much a particular photographic image reflects a camera-as-brush-attitude or camera-as-extension-of-vision attitude, but it's the fifth element that most strongly relates to why White split "visualization" into "previsualization" and "postvisualization". In The New Zone System Manual, White (with Richard Zakaria and Peter Lorenz) defined previsualization as
visualizing the photograph while studying the subject and postvisualization as
remembering back to the plan of the photograph or projecting forward to new combinations during the output stage (i.e., darkroom/printing stage in the film era).
Because Adams almost exclusively shot landscapes or otherwise staged/studio settings, his "attitude" toward creative continuity was strongly biased toward
previsualizing (in White's terms) the final look he intended to produce in the print and doing everything required to facilitate that during image capture. Adams maintained that the extensive darkroom work he engaged in was in the service of bringing forth what he visualized at image-capture time. He rejected the validity of "projecting forward to new combinations" and, therefore, never really needed to break apart or open up "visualization" into something more fluid and nuanced. He was rather rigid in that respect (due in large part to his early passion to break photography away from pictorialism and imitation of painting).
To me, however, White's revision is far more reflective of how photography as an artistic process really works, especially as it has moved beyond the early photography-as-an-independent-art-form that Adams helped to establish. The purist
previsualization attitude that Adams claimed for his own work is, I believe, contradicted by his own evolving darkroom efforts. It's not just that paper and chemistry changed. Adams, himself changed his
postvisualizing when producing prints later in his life from negatives taken years earlier. The best example of this changing attitude can be seen in his famous Moonrise image. On numerous occassions I've seen various renditions of this shot printed by Adams himself and the difference is considerable. Adams' efforts to address this in his autobiography is kind of BS. He claimed that he achieved his original "vision" of the scene only his late prints when he darkened the sky further to obscure the clouds. There was no reason why he couldn't have achieved the same "vision" in his earlier printed renderings of the shot. He was secretly engaging in
postvisualization but didn't want to admit it!
I found his "zone system" to be less than useful, but that's just me. As for the prints, yes they're impressive technically. But artistically they leave me cold. Over the years I've heard the "could you do better?" response too many times to count, but that could be asked about anything I don't happen to like. Adams is a cult figure in photography and his followers take umbrage when anyone is critical of his work or methods.
It's important to put Adams (as well as many of the other great early B&W art photographers) in historical context. He was instrumental in advancing photography as a fine art, and that should be appreciated even if one doesn't necessarily resonate to his work.
But the one thing I have learned over the years about great landscape photography is that it takes a significant investment in time and effort - an investment that most of us can't commit to.
Often a great photograph of a fabulous scene is after visiting the site many times for the best light - going out early to get it just after sunrise, waiting for hours for the right light or weather, hiking many miles to a position off the beaten track, getting into awkward spots for the best angle, carrying a tripod and heavier gear etc. etc.
Adams often mounted his camera on the roof of a car, so I imagine he didn't do as much hiking as might normally be assumed. He wasn't a lone photographer but had assistants to do the heavy lifting - both figuratively and literally. Not uncommon of course, but often glossed over.
Not for most of his iconic early work, for sure. Most of his assistance was in the darkroom and most of that was after he was well established and his prints and his training skills were in demand. Yes, he drove around with a platform on the top of his auto for some of his national parks work, but he quite often engaged in grueling hikes and camping trips to get the shots he got. He was accompanied by Cedric Wright on many of these trips, but Wright was a photographer himself and to the extent he was "assisting" Adams, Adams was also "assisting" Wright. I think its a mischaracterization to say that Adams' assistants did the "heavy lifting..."
Most of us just have to do the best we can when out for a walk with other people and catch the scene quickly, hand held and can't afford it the luxury of waiting for better light or weather.
That's definitely a "me too"
So if you want to shoot like a great landscape photographer - you need to put in the hard yards. The rest of us just hope to get lucky now and then and not to louse it up if a nice opportunity presents itself.
