Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/12/21

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Subject: [Leica] Re: Ansel Adams
From: tedgrant at shaw.ca (Ted Grant)
Date: Sun Dec 21 21:16:37 2008

 

Alan Magayne-Roshak offered in answer to George Lottermoser::

Subject: [Leica] Re: Ansel Adams

 

On Sun, 21 Dec 2008 Lottermoser George <imagist3@mac.com> wrote:

>Yes. It can get in the way of "soul." 

>Many find Ansel's work "cold" 

>I find his technical mastery 

>the "soul" of his work; when seen in original print form. 

=======================================

Alan said:

>>I'm one of those people.  Adam's pictures leave ME

cold. <<<

 

I have to say at the expense of maybe receiving ticking boxes via the post..
The only thing that I thought was any good about his "Rock & Fern stuff. OH
Yeah, mountains and moon light was?"

 

"He was without question the coolest darkroom technician in town!"

 

58 years ago when I first seriously began my photographer fun thing, his
work was hot stuff in all the photo magazines. I thought .. "gee this guy is
real good at taking pictures of mountains and stuff in parks, I better learn
everything I can about how he does it!" That was it, the more I read about
him and his "ZONE system" the less interested I became! 

 

I realized he was a "shoot & soup" one sheet of film at a time, learn this
zone system thing that appeared OK for rocks, ferns and mountains not going
anywhere. And I began to realize he was one of the smartest "photo how to
salesmen ever!" Buy into my system for a few dollars more and he sold it
extremely well!  His real prints are without question absolutely
magnificent! 

A darkroom technician unparalleled! Both film processing and printing. 

 

I suppose the biggest detriment of my following him was... "I wanted to
shoot for LIFE magazine and the other picture magazines around in those
early days." And it didn't appear they were big on mountains and ferns!  Nor
was he and his zone system really into 35mm, 36 exposure rolls of film.

 

His photography has never given me goose bumps of worldly excitement as it
seems it does for fine art people. The prints are technically as perfect as
it's possible to achieve, but they leave me as excited as a fish frozen in
ice! And I don't think it gets much colder than that.

 

But then I get big goose bumps of admiration over the photography of
Eisenstaedt, Ralph Morse, George Silk and the others of the early years of
LIFE! Now they were real photographers and masters of the photographic
moments!

 

ted

 

 

 


Replies: Reply from imagist3 at mac.com (Lottermoser George) ([Leica] Re: Ansel Adams)
Reply from tedgrant at shaw.ca (Ted Grant) ([Leica] Re: Ansel Adams)
In reply to: Message from amr3 at uwm.edu (Alan Magayne-Roshak) ([Leica] Re: Ansel Adams)