Re: [Leica] highquailty porn

[Peter Klein <pklein@2alpha.net>]

John: I think I detect a bit of prejudice against classicism here.  It's 
much like, in music, the Wagner disciple who also loves Beethoven, Liszt 
and Berlioz, but disparages Mozart as "tinkly," and Brahms as all 
technique, and not truly depicting the Titanic Struggle of Humankind 
Against Fate, which the true Wagnerian believes is the One True Purpose of 
Art.  Postmodernists have a similar problem for a different reason--they 
can't stand the idea that great art could be accomplished under such 
constraining, linear, and artificial principles which they believe were 
just the reality construct of the oppressive contemporary power structure 
as watered down into banality by the bourgeoisie.

I think Ansel Adams is a classicist.  He stressed perfection of technique. 
Instead of idealized, heroic, Greek-proportioned human figures, he gave us 
idealized heroic, Greek-proportioned granite domes and other natural 
wonders.  Beauty for beauty's sake.

If there's one thing this past century has taught us, it's that there are 
many ways of looking at the world, and most of the ones that are 
universally admired after their trendiness has passed are worthy of 
consideration, regardless of whether we naturally see or think that way.

If Adams' way of seeing is not yours, that's OK.  But to equate it with 
pornography just because it doesn't float your boat is a bit over the 
top.  Pornography is such a pejorative.  It implies sensual titillation, 
with no other redeeming value.  If you find Ansel Adams' work overblown, 
emotionally empty, a lot of visual sound and fury signifying nothing, or 
the visual equivalent of Newtonian physics in a post-Einsteinian universe, 
OK.  But pornography?  Nah!

My own experience:  When I went to Yosemite, I must say that the feeling I 
got being there was very much like the feeling I got viewing some of Adams' 
photographs.  Only being there was much more so.

(Aside:  This post earned me two hot peppers from Eudora!  Please pass the 
Sturm und Drang sauce!)

- --Peter Klein
Seattle, WA

Johnny Deadman sez:

>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.
>- --