Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/12/04

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Ansel Adams/John Wimberley WAS Mapplethorpe, highquailty porn
From: Johnny Deadman <john@pinkheadedbug.com>
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 15:56:49 -0500

on 4/12/00 2:12 pm, Mark Rabiner at mark@rabiner.cncoffice.com wrote:

> Ansel goes for the big effect. He's not into boring subtlety You WILL look at
> his images for more than one second.

There are a lot of his images I DON'T look at for more than one second,
certainly not in reproduction. AA's technique was such however that when you
see his images in the flesh there is a kind of hyper-reality about them that
can completely transfix you. But that is fundamentally a technical effect.
If you shoot something with an 8x10 camera and make a contact print you'll
get the same effect. You could call it 'deep seeing', and it can radically
transfrom the most mundane object. Edward Weston took amazing pix of
peppers... Ansel Adams made a boring picture of a rose, and a scissor and
some thread. To me, Weston's pictures were glorious and in many respects
unsurpassed. Ansel's were... very very sharp.

Okay, that's an unfair comparison. Perhaps we underestimate AA because he
has been so vastly copied. To draw another comparison with other media, he
reminds me of Tchaikovsky putting the cannons in the 1812 overture. They've
very, very... loud. I'd rather listen to Schubert or Beethoven.

- -- 
Johnny Deadman

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com

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