Re: [Leica] highquailty porn

[Johnny Deadman <john@pinkheadedbug.com>]

on 4/12/00 4:38 pm, Mark Rabiner at mark@rabiner.cncoffice.com wrote:

> And part of it is what you think is Pornography.
> Nixon said it was something that showed pubic hair.
> So any guy with a mustache is doing porn having his drivers license takin.
> My person definition of pornography is very simple:
> 
> Pornography is erotic art done poorly.
> 
> Anyone got a better one?

That's as good as I've heard. But I think you are getting away from my point
which was very simple, that AA's (and many others, to a much greater extent)
*share* some of the traits of pornography.

Jim said very convincingly that you a photograph can be 'of' something and
doesn't have to be 'about' something and I almost agreed for a moment
because he said it so straightforwardly but in the end all photos are
'about' something, even if it is simply Paul Strand's notion of 'the
equivalent of what I saw and felt', which is certainly a dictum that Ansel
Adams consciously endorsed (see THE NEGATIVE where he talks about this).

Certainly in the best of AA's work I feel something (who knows if it was
what HE felt... it doesn't matter) but there is a lot of it in which I
personally find no emotional resonance. I already cited the surf pictures.
Another would be the Golden Gate before the Bridge. Now I am not so
egocentric as to read from this that there WAS no emotion, only that it has
not successfully communicated itself to me.

Another way of looking at this is that there is a deep conventionality in
Ansel Adams work. His compositions are extraordinarily similar to the
compositions of 19th C landscape painters (with some notable exceptions...
the desert picture, for example). There is a conscious debt to Timothy
O'Sullivan, in whose shadow AA no doubt sometimes felt he resided. You look
long and hard for modernism in Ansel's work. (Unlike for example Walker
Evans or Weston). Now you may say that's fine and dandy, I can do without
modernism, but after looking at AA's work I yearn for a composition that was
'off', fractured, oblique, teasing, not conventionally 'perfect'.

AA permitted no dissonance in his work. He describes in EXAMPLES how he
painstakingly retouched some graffiti out of one picture. And I never read a
single word of his that implied he had ever questioned his method, or looked
into his soul to find a picture. There is no sense of struggle, except the
technical struggle he certainly won. What does that leave me with? The
uncomfortable sense that I am looking at, if not pornography, then the
photographic equivalent of, like I say, Singer Sargeant, Tschaikowsky or the
later Wordsworth. Magnificent wallpaper.

- -- 
Johnny Deadman

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com