[Leica] adams/weston

[Guy Bennett <guybnt@idt.net>]

>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.
>Johnny Deadman


to me it seems that adams' pictures - as amazing as they can be - only
rarely transcend their subject matter. because they are so much about their
explicit content, and because that content is so masterfully captured, they
offer a sense of closure such that i find it difficult to see past the
content when viewing his pictures, and when i've moved on to the next room
in the gallery or closed the book, they leave me.

some of weston's finest images - the peppers for example - are about much
more than their explicit content. they are explorations of light and form,
and at times that exploration is so intense that the images border on
abstraction.

in many cases, the 'true' subject of the photos seems to be seeing, or
form, or texture, etc., and not  merely peppers, or seaweed on the beech,
or a toilet. there's something else at work there, and it's that something
else that stays with me, makes me want to review the images and try to
determine why it attracts me.

three statements by r gibson come to mind:

"this is the essence of photographic alchemy: it takes as its point of
departure unimportant objects or events then transcends their appearance."

"often, the object is not interesting, but a photograph of the object is."

"i intend the act of photographic perception itself to be the subject of
the photograph."

guy