The History of Photograhy Part III: It's NOT Porn!

Everyone has a favorite & everyone's favorite is Ansel Adams.

Everyone knows who Ansel Adams is because he's the only photographer people can name.

There are girls all over the country that have his pictures hanging up in their dorm rooms...next to the Van Gogh posters...you know, the one of the  al fresco cafe...you know:

You either had that hanging in your room in college:

Or you had Klimt:

Or you had rose & drift wood by Ansel Adams:

Of course that's only for the English Lit, Fine Arts, I'm trying to be deep crowd.  Look at me, I have taste in art.  If you are not part of that crowd don't worry, there are stereotypes for you as well.

For the Science crowd:

You can admit it, no one's going to judge but me...or was it this one in your dorm room?

Or this one, because, you know, you were a freshman virgin, but you were all about the pussy.

Or were you maybe the religious scientist:

Then again, you could have been the campus idiot, at what point you had one of these hanging up in your dorm room...possibly all of them:

Now let's be honest...which one were you?  Now which one did you date?  And which did you hang out with?

I'll confess, I was the asshole with the Korda photo.

"Hasta la siempre victoria!"

It doesn't matter, all that matters is that you know who Ansel Adams is & that if you are not one of those posters you were a woman & had the Alfred Eisenstaedt print:

If you didn't have or see the rose with driftwood print, then you at least had the calender, or are familiar enough with his work to know that Ansel Adams was the dude that took pictures of nature.

And that is really a fair assessment of his work.  It seriously is...really...that is what he is famous for.

He has produced some really beautiful images & if I did a post about Capa yesterday, I absolutely have to do a post about Adams today.

It makes for a nice compare & contrast.

Adams was born into a very wealthy family & he was one of the pioneers in his industry.  He was also a famous American Photographer before he really even started, or at least a famous American, or rather a famous Californian, thanks to his family's wealth.

He also was a good photographer, as in, yeah, he's going to tell you exactly how he took his images.

If you read the post about Capa, than you already know his philosophy on photography:

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you are not standing close enough."

It makes for a very nice contract because Ansel Adams had a philosophy too:

"Patience is a virtue."

Like I said, it's a pretty stark contrast.

On one hand you have a poor Hungarian, that pretended to be a rich American, trying to make his way in the world.  He believed that in order to get a great picture you have to risk your life, fight for it, & get in the middle of the action.

And on the other hand you had a rich & famous American...who was actually an American & not just pretending to be...who believed that in order to get a great picture you had to sit back with a cup of coffee & wait for the picture to come to you.

Actually it's kind of what he insisted on, because he did sort of believe that if you do the Robert Capa thing than you are belittling the trade...which was about patience & not action.  Photography was a refined art & one that required you to keep your hands clean.

They are both correct, but they were also taking pictures of completely different things.

Let's face it, most of us are not going to buy a poster print of a Spanish soldier, shot in the head, in a battle against fascism.  Most of us...some of us will.

Most of us are not going to buy a calender full of dead bodies & bombed out cities either...most of us...some of us will...& we call them strange.

The nice thing about Ansel Adams is that he openly admits that yeah, you can take all the pictures he did.

And if you took photography in high school, you have a picture just like this don't you?  I know I do.  I distinctly remember "Oh, I'll take a black & white picture of leaves."  I can even tell you where I was when I took it & I might honestly have my dope sheet still in one of the many composition notebooks collecting in my parent's basement.

I've taken an Adams picture, you have taken an Adams picture, we ALL have taken an Adams picture, we generally did it shortly after we loaded our first ever roll of Tri-X & let's face it, some of us have yet to grow out of it.

Adams also had a pretty serious hard-on for nature.

He was one of our nation's early environmentalists.  A man that was dedicated to the preservation of our national parks.  National parks were honestly his first love & if you listen to his wife Virginia, they were a love she could never compete with...

...& she was cool with that.

What he did was go on hikes.  He would walk to a beautiful piece of nature, set up his camera, & simply wait, at his camp site, until nature provided him with just the right light, & then he'd snap the picture.

Snap shots.  Beautiful snap shots, but snapshots nonetheless.

What's why he said that you can take pictures just as good as he can.  All you have to do is wait for it...wait for it...wait for it...SNAP!

Everything he did through the 20s & 30s was all natural light & he kept with that straight through the end of his life.  You will rarely find him "cheating" with strobes & reflectors, & hot lights, & the things that photographers need to use when they have deadlines & clients.

The other people that don't bother with all of that are the photographers with an "eye" & no idea what a fill is.

But World War II happened & suddenly, people started saying that he might not be the best photographer in the world.

Adams might have admitted that you could do it too, but he also had an ego & there was a little Hungarian from the lower classes that was quickly usurping his throne.

Not only was he getting all the press, he was also poor.  And Adams knew he was poor, & he knew he wasn't a real American, & people were calling Capa things that they had never called Adams before.  Brave, fearless, Hungarian, you know...

And the big joke behind that was the fact that Capa insisted he was NOT Hungarian right up to the point that he convinced everyone he was an American.  And then, well, cat out of the bag, who cared, he was welcomed just about everywhere.

So, instead of competing, Adams got a grant from the government to shoot more nature pictures.  Going to war made you force the shot not wait for it like a gentlemen.  War made you get up into the action, not sit back & wait for it, it forced you to use 35mm film, it was a dirty, messy affair for the lower classes.  He wasn't about to join the war cause as a photographer or anything else.

War photography was a trade for journalists, not artists like himself.

And did his best to slander the upstart's name.

Later Adams became an officer in the US Army by building a new darkroom for the Smithsonian, with the caveat that he stay firmly within the United States.  The Smithsonian needed a new darkroom, Adams was one of the few & certainly the most famous photographer left in the US, so he made a deal.

The Smithsonian wanted a dark room & he wanted to say he served during World War II.  So Adams walked away with an officer's commission & no military orders.

And the Smithsonian walked away with...the Smithsonian is a building, buildings can't walk...yet...but it did get the most modern & innovative darkroom for that time.  So he did a stellar job.

But the thing is, despite his hatred for usurpers & his disdain for the lower classes, his new military commission made him privy to a disturbing fact.

He looked at the Internment of Japanese-Americans & it absolutely disgusted him.  He honestly thought it was the most repulsive thing that America had done since slavery.

It pissed him off royally.  So while everyone else was clamoring to dethrone Robert Capa as the world's greatest photographer & get all the bloody glory of a famous war correspondent, Adams used his new commission to renegotiate his contract with the US Government.

He wanted to take pictures of the interment camps...for propaganda purposes.

A picture is worth a thousand words...& the United States government wanted to reassure its people that their fellow Japanese-American's were being fairly treated & detained in comfort with all the amenities of home.

Adams was more than happy to take the photos...but to be fair, he did speak out about the internment...well, it was more like a whisper.

So he turned his lens on the camps.

He used his military commission to get in & then he turned around & started whispering as faintly as possible about how wrong it was:

"Psst.  Hey, you with the yellow hate.  The Japanese are Americans too.  Psst."

And absolutely no one listened.

No one listened to him mainly because he made sure that the pictures looked as beautiful as he could & that works more for the pro-internment propaganda than it did for his intended anti-internment propaganda.

Ansel Adams really didn't like what he considered "gritty & unrefined plebeian images."  And those are exactly what you need when you are trying to show the horror of internment.

But, to Adam's credit, he kept it up until the war was over & the Japanese-Americans were freed.  And the US Government didn't really care because he could whisper all he wanted & what he said didn't exactly match the beauty of the pictures he was producing.

What are you going to believe, what Ansel Adams vaguely said or what Ansel Adams took a picture of?

And then he went back to nature.

But that little upstart still hounded him & to top it all off, he was living in America, working for Alfred Hitchcock, & banging Ingrid Bergman.

Jealousy took over & he accused Capa of staging his most famous photograph:

And accused him of being a coward...which didn't sit too well with his fellow Americans, particularly those that stormed into France on D-Day, right along side Robert Capa.  So he could cry as he may, but no one was really listening to him.

So he quietly brushed that under the rug & when American's started to realize how horrible Japanese internment was, he cleverly pointed out his whispers & not the propaganda work he did on behalf of the internment....

...and now you can buy the internment photographs in a book.  And yes, they are as beautiful as all his other work.

And besides, college freshmen were not buying Robert Capa prints to hang in their dorm rooms in an effort to look deep:

But his real contribution was, ironically, in journalism.  He actually helped to found the non-profit Aperture Magazine, which, honestly, did more for photography than either Ansel Adams or Robert Capa could possibly do.

Aperture Magazine was innovative because it was a widely publicized fine art photography magazine.  This was a new concept in the world.  There were few people rallying behind the "photography is art" movement in America.

Let's face it, when you think of a magazine with lots of pictures, there are one of two types that jump into your mind.  The first is your common run-of-the-mill journalistic fair:

And the other is porn:

Aperture Magazine sort of kicked down those stereotypes better than any photographer could, & although, there had been "fine art" photographers in the past, no one really paid attention to the medium. 

Suddenly, thanks to Ansel Adam's backing of "journalism" a trade that he looked down on, people started to pay attention to photography as art & not as porn or journalism...which are sometimes the same thing.

I'll leave you with this: