Sounds & Fury

A Conversation On Photographic Aesthetics

It’s been years since we turned our mind in serious fashion to photography generally, and landscape photography in particular, but this Guardian blog article on the great landscape photographer Ansel Adams by journalist Lisa Drysdale provoked us to participate in the article’s comments section as we saw expressed there some rather, um, curious opinions concerning Adams’s work. Wrote one commenter:

Adams' images of the 'unspoiled American West' are, in a word, reactionary. All environmental, political, and social issues (such as mining, the situation of indigenous peoples forced from these landscapes, the world war which was occurring contemporaneously) are kept safely out of shot and replaced with a comforting image of a fake eden.

Uh-huh. Well, that comment was so mind-blowingly mindless that we passed on responding to it altogether. The following was a bit better, and was at least well reasoned and well expressed:

I find Ansel Adams' work tremendously boring, and for all its ubiquity some while back, it is interesting that there have been few — if any — photographers of note who have attempted to take up his torch.

[Adams’s] work itself is incredibly reactionary, and I feel somewhat at odds with his contribution to the Sierra Club. I also find it completely unnatural, of having little to do with nature itself. It is glacially cold and uninvolving, like nature transformed into alabaster: smooth, perfect, and false. 'Vivid'? Not at all, not at all... It invites responses such as 'stunning' and 'awe', but these are not responses of engagement but rather stunned submission, mute incapacity. It invokes certain emotions that one might hope would belong to its subject but claims them for itself; as such, its comparison should not be with Cartier-Bresson but Salgado, another photographer who similarly allows the demonstration of his own technical skill to come before all else, leaving the rather sorrowful sense that the photograph is more important than that which is photographed.

To which we responded:

Adams wrote, "I look upon the lines and forms of Nature as if they were but the vast expression of ideas within the Cosmic Mind."

Just so. And it was precisely that, not the "lines and forms of Nature" that Adams captured in his prints, thereby permitting us to see and experience it as well.

And as to, your finding it "interesting that there have been few — if any — photographers of note who have attempted to take up [Adams's] torch," while it may be interesting it's hardly surprising. Many — professionals and devoted amateurs alike — have tried to follow Adams. All have found the attempt futile. Like all genius, Adams was a one-off. A photographer attempting to "take up [Adams's] torch," is tantamount to a composer attempting to take up the torch of a Bach, or a Mozart, or a Beethoven. It's a circle-squaring exercise doomed ineluctably to failure.

That brought the following thoughtful response:

Thanks for your reply. I suspect that I may not have been very clear in my point about influence, and suspect that I shall not be much clearer now, but I shall try and comment upon it further.

[...]

Adams ... was almost entirely dependent upon an aesthetic vocabulary created by, amongst others, Muybridge, O'Sullivan, Watkins, Bell, Fiske... He was aided, also, by a conceptual re-evaluation of nineteenth-century landscape photography by MoMA that was attempting to establish the creation myths of the artform, and so what had previously been the merely utilitarian — landscape photographs taken to show the route of a new railroad, or a prospective mine, and all, of course, devoid of natives — were reimagined as examples of the West Coast sublime. I do not deny that Adams added a technical ability that surpassed event that of his similarly obsessed contemporaries, although I'd also suggest that on a print by print comparison, it would be virtually impossible to distinguish works by Adams, Weston and others.

The quotation you provide elaborates, well enough, Adams' intentions, but it is something that might as easily been said by a host of others, from Stieglitz to Minor White to Aaron Siskind. As such, allied with his fetishism of technique, one can see it as part of a long and particularly American tradition in which technical perfectionism and spiritual aspiration become the driving forces of Manifest Destiny; from 'Half Dome' to Apollo XI is but a small step.

My greatest problem with the work, however, is perfectly expressed in this blog's original post, and which I tried (unsuccessfully it seems) to suggest in my original response. The photographs suggest a view of nature untouched by man, even in which man is yet to appear, although as we know they often show places from which man had been forcibly removed. It is a nature with which we are not invited to engage or feel part of; it is certainly not a nature in which we feel we could survive: it is airless, devoid of movement, almost sepulchral. They are like exquisitely carved alabaster memorials of something that no longer lives.

I mean that as a criticism; his supporters seem to think such an attitude a compliment: to suggest that looking at one of his prints of Yosemite in an art gallery is more vivid than actually being in that place is a deeply worrying attitude, and one that demonstrates a contempt for nature rather than its celebration. Whereas Ruskin would write rapturously on Turner's watercolours, it would always be as a prelude to his own experiences in Chamonix, or wherever, and a broader engagement with the ongoing systems of geology, or the weather; art would be a means of engaging with nature, and an important one, but clearly subservient to it. Here, similarly, an image reminds the writer of their own experience of a particularly extraordinary place, yet the place, nature, is subservient to its representation. For Adams, like many artists before him, nature was somehow lacking, and needed his intervention in order to make it worthy of our attention, his method of 'pre-visualisation' his chosen means of identifying how the nature before him could be bettered. Ultimately, we are invited to admire not nature, but rather the aesthetic sensibilities and technical skill of man, and one man in particular. I accept that some find their own satisfaction in this; I do not.

To which we responded:

I thank you for your thoughtful response, but I'm afraid most of your facts are egregiously in error as is your assessment of the driving force behind Adams's work and of its uniqueness and importance.

Let me first try to set the facts straight, and then comment a bit on the nature of Adams's particular genius (which term I use most advisedly), and on what makes his work sui generis, important, and uncopyable. In doing this I don't intend here to write an exhaustive essay on these matters, but present them in brief outline only.

In the beginning, Adams was set on a career as a concert pianist as his gifts for music and the instrument gave promise of his becoming one. From early childhood (he was a privately tutored only child) he was irresistibly drawn to the natural landscapes of his California home, and the landscapes of Yosemite in particular (as a teenager he joined the Sierra Club around 1915 or so), and spent all his free time exploring and photographing these with a Kodak Brownie box camera in the "painterly" photographic style of the day (late-19th, early-20th century). He was successful in this endeavor to the point that his photos from these expeditions were published by the Sierra Club around 1921 or so, and his prints of these were given a gallery showing at the Club's headquarters some few years later.

Then, around 1927 or so, came the turning point in Adams's photographic career with his meeting both the work and the persons of Paul Strand and Edward Weston, and it was then he abandoned totally the painterly landscape photographic style then prevailing, and from then on developed with Weston what was later to be known as "straight photography" ( i.e., a style unique to camera and film and its technical capabilities utilizing the lens's ability to produce subtly-gradated, razor-sharp black-and-white images in great depth of field, and with no darkroom manipulation of the final print other than the aesthetic refining that's part of the ordinary photographic process), and soon surpassed both Strand and Weston in his own development of that style for his landscape photography. Your characterizing this as a "fetishism of technique" is as wrong as wrong could be. It was simply — and exactly — the same sort of necessary attention to and development of technique involved in playing an instrument at a world-class level where technique is transparent, and the music is freed to be heard as it wants and needs to be heard. Needless to say, your notion that "on a print by print comparison, it would be virtually impossible to distinguish works by Adams, Weston and others," is thoroughly and demonstrably wrong. Although many have tried, no-one has ever succeeded in producing an original landscape image that could be mistaken for an Adams-visualized and -printed original landscape.

So much for the facts. Now on to your response to Adams's work

One cannot gainsay another's personal response to any artwork no matter how benighted one may think it to be. Therefore I can't declare wrong your view of Adams's photographs as "airless, devoid of movement, almost sepulchral, [and] ... like exquisitely carved alabaster memorials of something that no longer lives," even though I think it arrantly wrong and utterly benighted. What those Adams-printed landscape images in fact are is jaw-droppingly, awe-inducingly transcendent; the sort of transcendence never achieved or even approached by any landscape photographer before or since. At their best, Adams's printed landscape images transfigure and transcend their subjects by rendering in the processed image not the subject's outward appearance, but its ineffable spiritual and mystic center as Adams "previsualized" it when looking at the framed view of the scene on the ground glass of his large-format view camera. Those images are *meant* to reveal a nature "untouched by man, even in which man is yet to appear," as you put it. They are instead meant to reveal what's hidden from most eyes (hidden from *all* eyes before Adams made it visible): nature as the manifestation of "ideas within the Cosmic Mind," as Adams put it.

And that's the secret of their greatness and importance, and the key to their sublimity and to the sublimity of Adams's sui generis vision.

We await further word in response from our intelligent if misguided correspondent if indeed further word is forthcoming.

Stay tuned.

Explains Just About Everything

Regular readers of this blog over the years are more than passingly aware of our numerous, um, criticisms of the quality of the arts coverage of the mainstream media, particularly the daily mainstream media, in terms of its content, its writers, and the makeup of its pages, our most frequent target being the arts pages of The New York Times. We most frequently target The Times because it's our "native" newspaper, so to speak (although not a native New Yorker, we've been reading the arts pages of The Times since our junior high school days); a newspaper that's often, and for good reason, referred to as America's "National Newspaper of Record"; and because of the precipitous descent in the quality and content of those pages over the past couple years or so in particular.

Well, the man most responsible for that descent — New York Times culture editor, Sam Sifton, who was appointed culture editor of The Times in 2005 — is holding court and fielding reader questions this week in The Times's Talk to the Newsroom section of the newspaper, and so we thought we might ask a question or ten of Mr. Sifton. But all we could think of to ask was the simple question:

What specially qualifies you to "overse[e] the daily Arts pages ... and [the] Arts & Leisure [section]" of any major broadsheet, much less The New York Times, our "National Newspaper of Record"?

Needless to say, and as expected, our question wasn't published, and no answer was otherwise forthcoming.

We don't blame Mr. Sifton for that, actually, as the question was both unseemly and exceedingly rudely put, and aggressive in the extreme into the bargain. And so we went a-Googling for an answer. And what did we find? This, from the 2005 Times press release announcing Mr. Sifton's appointment as the culture editor of The Times:

Mr. Sifton, 38, has been deputy culture editor at The Times since 2004. He joined The Times in 2001 as deputy Dining editor, and became Dining editor later that year. Previously he was a founding editor of Talk magazine where he worked until 1998. Before joining Talk he held a number of positions at the New York Press from 1990 to 1998, including managing editor, media critic, senior editor, contributing editor and restaurant critic. Before joining the New York Press he taught social studies in New York City public schools from 1990 to 1994. Before that, he was an assistant editor at American Heritage from 1988 to 1990.

Mr. Sifton graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. degree in history and literature in 1988. He is author of A Field Guide to the Yettie (Talk Miramax Books, 2000).

Pretty much explains just about everything, doesn't it.

A Question Of Art

My previous post on the photographs of the great landscape photographer Ansel Adams brought to mind a discussion of a year or so ago concerning the color landscape photographs of Galen and Barbara Rowell, in which, to the displeasure of all present, I declared the photographs to be "trash art." I used that term due solely the context of that particular discussion as ordinarily I would have referred to the rather spectacular landscape images of both these photographers (both of whom died in an airplane crash in 2002) as kitsch, pretty and appealing though they are; the sort of stuff one might find as original illustrations for commercial wall calendars sold at mainstream retail outlets. In other words, not really art at all, except by using the term either carelessly or informally.

But what made me so certain — instantly certain, as a matter of fact — these images didn't qualify as genuine art? What criterion (or criteria) was I using to instantly and subliminally make that judgment? And were real criteria involved at all, or was it simply a matter of my tastes and gut-level prejudices at work?

These were questions that occurred to me the next day, and as it turned out, I'm pleased to relate, real criteria were indeed involved, although it's easier to know them than it is to tell them.

But I'll risk the attempt.

First, and easiest to tell and understand, is that, unless something abstract (i.e., non-"straight") is intended, by the very fact of a natural-light nature photograph being in color it's incapable of nuanced manipulation for expressive purpose, and the color image rendered is pretty much guaranteed to be hyper-real in both saturation and hue, and therefore pretty much guaranteed to be irredeemably untrue and vulgar as photographs of nature. "Straight" color photographs of nature subjects almost always are (I say almost to allow for the unlikely possibility that somewhere, by someone, there exists a "straight" color photograph of a nature subject that's not irredeemably untrue and vulgar).

Further, because the color rendered in the image under any given natural lighting conditions is determined entirely by the manufacturer's "build" of the emulsion and its subsequent absolutely rigid processing, the color results are exactly the same for all users, only extremely limited post-processing alteration of the color rendering being permitted with color prints from negative stock, and none at all with positive transparencies,* again, unless something abstract is intended.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, brightness ranges in natural-light landscape are the most extreme of any location, and color stock, both negative and positive, but especially positive, can handle only a very limited portion of that range (as compared with black-and-white stock), brightnesses at the top of the actual scale going very quickly and abruptly to detail-less and texture-less off-color whites in the image, and at the bottom of the scale, to detail-less and texture-less blacks.

And so the final image color and capturable brightness range are, ultimately, unalterably determined by the manufacturer of the film (and of the paper as well in the case of color prints from negative stock), the photographer being entirely at the mercy of the fixed characteristics of the emulsions he uses, as is not the case with black-and-white materials, and therefore having to accept whatever image those emulsions and their rigid processing produce, unless he chooses to go an intentionally abstract (non-"straight") route, in which case the nature photograph becomes not a nature photograph at all, but something quite different.

Less easy to understand for many is the fact that every "straight" color photograph pretends to reality; that is, pretends to render with fidelity things in the natural world as seen normally by the eyes of Homo sapiens, and it's due that very fact that the messing about with the color image for expressive purpose is so severely limited. Go beyond that severely narrow limit and the color rendering is perceived instantly as in some way "wrong" or, worse, inept.

This problem with color stock is, again, not a problem when working with black-and-white materials, negative and print, as a black-and-white print — the invariable final form of all black-and-white images — of even a "straight" photographic image is instantly perceived from the get-go as an abstraction, and therefore the range and degree of manipulation of even a "straight" black-and-white photographic image for expressive purpose — both in- and out-of-camera, and at just about every stage of production for both negative and print — is, within widespread boundaries, limited in practice only by the expressive gift and technical skill of the photographer.

The upshot of all this is that any "straight" color photograph of a nature subject (again, allowing that an exception might exist, even though I've never encountered such an exception) is guaranteed to have about it a sense of sameness with other such color photographs, and have about it as well a sense of the aesthetically constrained, both of which are art-destroying at the most fundamental level.

And such is true of all the Rowell photographs I've seen, both on their website, and at firsthand.

But there's even more to it than that in the case of the Rowell photographs.

Like all non-art, the Rowell images have no secrets, or having them, give them up all at once on first apprehension. That's a virtual hallmark of non-art. No genuine work of art does that — ever. Genuine art, whatever its medium, always possesses secrets, and gives them up slowly, little by little, only to the most searching and probing eye or ear, the greatest works seemingly having an almost limitless store which are never divulged entirely no matter how long and deep the searching and probing.

Which brings me to my rule-of-thumb, my initial criterion, for judging whether a work is genuine art or not whatever its medium. I call it the Jabberwocky Test. If a work fails that test on first and repeated apprehensions it's unquestionably and irredeemably non-art, and to the extent it meets the test is it genuine art of greater or lesser degree.

"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don't exactly know what they are!" exclaimed Alice after reading Jabberwocky for the first time. The capacity of a work to provoke that feeling in an informed and experienced receiver is almost a very definition of genuine art, and, regardless of its medium, any work absent that quality is most assuredly non-art.

The Jabberwocky Test in no way depends on the tester finding the work under test to be personally appealing. What it does depend on is the depth of the tester's knowledge of the domain to which the work belongs, and his ability to put aside his personal likes and dislikes, and make his judgment based on the qualities of the individual work itself.

For instance, I've a marked antipathy to 19th- and 20th-century French music, but that doesn't in the least prevent me from at once recognizing that the works of, say, Debussy (a composer whose works I particularly loathe) most decidedly pass Jabberwocky muster. My knowledge of music permits me to make that determination with some measure of confidence. Similarly, but on the flip side, I positively adore the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle (see my previous post on this), but my personal love of that classic canon, and as enduring as that canon has been for the past 100 years or so, does not in any way prevent me seeing clearly that it most decidedly fails Jabberwocky. Again, my knowledge of literature permits me that judgment with some measure of confidence.

So, neither a matter of being personally captivated by a work, nor of "I know art when I see it," but rather a matter of sufficient knowledge brought to bear on a work in cool detachment from one's own personal quirks, prejudices, likes, and dislikes.

Not as difficult as it sounds, strange to tell.

As a first determiner of art and non-art, I've found the Jabberwocky Test virtually infallible, and the Rowells' spectacular landscape photographs fail that test most resoundingly. De mortuis nihil nisi bonum said the ancient sage. But in matters as important as art, truth trumps ... everything.

---

*In the case of positive transparencies, one can, of course, go to a third-generation color print from an internegative made from the positive, in which case the extremely limited post-processing alterations possible with color prints using original negative stock would obtain, but with all the deterioration of image quality that third-generation guarantees.

Adams Remembered

Watching yesterday a documentary on the life of the celebrated American landscape photographer Ansel Adams, I was reminded afresh of the influence the transcendent work of this great artist had on my life; was in fact responsible for one of its turning points.

After spending years training for a career in music, I quit conservatory having convinced myself — rightly, as I then thought (and today still think) despite protestations to the contrary by mentors and teachers — I lacked the native gift required to become anything more than a first-rate second-rater, and as a matter of necessity turned instead to the world of business, in which world, and to my utter surprise and mild horror, it fast became apparent I did possess the native gift to become more than a first-rate second-rater, and so became fairly well-off (if not genuinely rich) fairly quickly.

After spending some ten years at this, I glimpsed into my future, and was there confronted by the bleak and depressing prospect that the most my life would ever accomplish would be to make more money. Well, money is important only when it's lacking, and as one of my favorite movie lines goes (this one from Citizen Kane, and as verbatim as I can remember it): "It's no trick to make a lot of money — if all you want is to make a lot of money."

So, at the ripe age of 30, I left the world of business, and struck out on a new career in the world of the arts — sort of. What I did was take up a career as a photographer of architecture. While not considered among the high arts, photography, when practiced at the highest level, was art enough for me and whatever small gift for it I may have possessed. The career change also seemed to me a perfectly reasonable business decision as architecture was one of my lifelong interests, I already had a secure knowledge of basic photographic technique which I was certain I could expand easily enough to become expert, and by my taking on a well-chosen clientele I felt sure I could earn an at least bread-and-butter living by my efforts.

And it worked out just as I'd envisioned, better than I envisioned, until one day I encountered an original print by Adams, my first. It was an original print of this:

and I was lost. I almost couldn't believe that what I was looking at was a photographic print so unlike was it from any photographic print I'd ever seen. I immediately undertook a detailed investigation of Adams's work, and within a week decided to abandon photographing architecture forever, and so embarked on a course that for years after was determined to follow in Adams's footsteps.

So, what's with that photograph?, you may ask. It's simply a pretty picture. And it's indeed merely that — until, that is, one has seen at firsthand an original Adams print of that pretty picture, whereupon the pretty picture instantly transforms into something infinitely greater; something almost unimaginable for one with no prior experience of an original Adams print.

The experience of one's initial encounter with an original Adams print is one of aesthetic shock; or better, aesthetic arrest, to use Joyce's language. As remarked above, one even has some difficulty persuading oneself that the print is a photograph so physically different does it appear from an ordinary black-and-white photographic print, no matter how well made. The blacks are impossibly deep; the whites, impossibly radiant; the gradation of tones from deepest black to most brilliant white, impossibly rich, subtle, and delicately detailed; and the lambently luminous whole so seemingly three-dimensional one imagines one could reach one's hand beyond the print's surface and deep into the image itself.

All that is the product of Adams's prodigious technical skill, and as well an essential element of the uncopyable core of his singular visual genius. That technical skill can be acquired by most dedicated photographers possessing a good photographic eye, but even when acquired is but groundwork only; a matter of mere craft the possession of which is expected of any serious photographer working in black-and-white. In his mature landscape work, however, Adams's art goes beyond — vastly beyond — questions of mere craft (his early landscape work is, well, early work, reflecting the perversely painterly but in-fashion "art photograph" style of the time, and his non-landscape work was, throughout his career, largely unremarkable).

At their best, Adams's printed landscape images transfigure and transcend their subjects, and render in the processed image not the subject's outward appearance, but its ineffable spiritual and mystic center as Adams "previsualized" it when looking at the framed view of the scene on the ground glass of his large-format view camera. ("Previsualization" is Adams's term for seeing in the mind's eye the finished photographic print of the image seen on the ground glass.) "I look upon the lines and forms of Nature as if they were but the vast expression of ideas within the Cosmic Mind," said Adams. Just so. And it was precisely that, not the "lines and forms of Nature" that Adams captured in his prints, thereby permitting us to see and experience it as well.

I've never met a serious photographer, myself included, who, for the first time ensorcelled by an Adams's print, did not, after first recovering from the initial shock, imagine he could exactly match its qualities if he worked assiduously enough at learning and practicing all the necessary techniques. Indeed, Adams himself fostered and encouraged such a notion, and shared enthusiastically his methods and techniques with others, wrote detailed books on the subject that are still earnestly studied classics in the field, and was generous almost to a fault with his time in giving personal help and guidance to other serious photographers. Thousands — again, myself included — have benefited immeasurably from his teaching, but none — not one — has ever succeeded in producing a self-visualized and -made print of a landscape subject that could be mistaken by an experienced eye for a genuine Adams-visualized and -made print. If nothing else, that alone is more than sufficient to refute decisively the snobbish and purblind notion that a "straight" (i.e., non-abstract) photographic print can never qualify as a work of genuine art.

There's a famous story of the renowned photographer, art historian, museum curator, writer, and scholar, Beaumont Newhall, who one day, while thumbing through a magazine, unexpectedly came across an Adams landscape image the original print of which was known to him. His fresh apprehension of the image made him literally fall back in awe on the couch on which he was sitting, murmuring to himself that Adams must surely be the greatest photographer who ever lived.

The story is not apocryphal, and in his judgment Newhall was not far wrong.