Texts from A Birthday with Presence SW only

A Birthday with Presence

The following texts were written to accompany “A Birthday with Presence,” an exhibition at Images Gallery in honor of the 150^th anniversary of the invention of photography.  The titles given below the photographers’ names indicate the images that were in the exhibition.

Sean Wilkinson
October 1989

 

KATHERINE FISHMAN
“Cupid”, 1978

Right from the start everyone was astonished by the veracity of photographs.  Many were disappointed, however, that the images were “only” black and white.  For all their remarkable fidelity of detail, a dimension of reality was felt to be missing in the absence of color.  Photographers set about to compensate for this regretted lack by applying paints and dyes to their pictures, even including some of the earliest daguerreotypes.

Over the past century and a half, countless methods for making color photographs were explored.  Few of them were sufficiently satisfying, simple, or inexpensive to be widely attractive.  Only within recent decades have there been highly reliable, effortless (for the consumer!), and affordable systems of color photography.  Now, black and white accounts for only a minute share of the market in photographic materials.

The advent of simple, accurate color photography coincided with an expanded view of the potential of hand coloring. Instead of conforming strictly to conventions of natural color, some artists used the medium of paint on black and white photographs to alter the image until it became a new hybrid, a cross between a camera picture and an easel painting.  The best such work suggests the vitality and rich possibilities of aesthetic evolution.

AARON SISKIND
From the series “Pleasure and Terrors of Levitation”, 1961

The great majority of Aaron Siskind’s work reveals the infinitely variable expressive possibilities of what we define, perhaps with too little thought, as abstraction.  In hundreds of photographs Siskind shows us the powerful, evocative language of visual gesture, the subtle grace of apparently random marks.  His pictures carry a full range of human feeling translated through the hieroglyphs of scarred walls, tattered signs, and other urban fragments penetratingly observed.

While deeply involved in such work decades ago, Siskind’s attention was caught by a very different source of expressive gesture.  He made a series of pictures of young men as they leaped from a diving board.  He pointed his camera upward and froze the exuberant divers at the apogee of their flight, framing them against the sky, which he purposely caused to go blank.  Thus removed from the mundane context of cavorting at the pool, these young men become celebrants, perhaps ecstatic, perhaps terrified, most probably both, in an unknown ritual with dramatic suggestions of life and death.

JANE REECE
“Angles” (posed by Harry Losee, dancer), 1922
“Portrait of Edward Weston”, 1919

and

EDWARD WESTON
“Dr. Atl, Mexico”, 1926
“White Radish”, 1933
“Dunes, Oceano”, 1936
“Pepper”, 1930

The “everydayness” of photography has been a fundamental quality of the medium from the beginning.  For the snapshooter and the historian of popular culture, this quality has provided an inexhaustible largesse.  Photographs, it seems, can and do record anything and everything on the face of the earth.  Of the billions of photographs made each year (more than fast food hamburgers, more than bricks, more than any other artifact) the vast majority are made for the simple purpose of recording everyday life: pictures of families and friends, vacation snaps, records of school trips, picnics, graduations, Christmas trees.

This overwhelming mass of ordinary, even banal pictures made it difficult for the few photographers who wished to use the medium to produce images recognizable as art.  By the 19th century, venerable tradition had set that activity outside the realm of the everyday.  Even when the subject matter for art was not confined to religious or classical motifs, the making of art was considered the exclusive province of those very few who were both inspired by genius and gifted with rare talent.  Photographs, it was plain, could be just as easily made without a trace of either attribute.

For several decades, those photographers who longed to be considered artists indulged in various practices designed to elevate their plebian craft into the patrician status vouchsafed to painting.  They used soft focus lenses for “impressionistic” effects, various hand-applied emulsions and pigments to suggest a painter’s hand, and multiple printing techniques to contrive allegorical clichés, all in an effort to transcend the “merely mechanical” process of camera documentation.

Eventually, the compulsion to compensate for a perceived artistic inferiority was largely overcome.  Rallying behind Alfred Stieglitz, whose vision and ego were both vast enough to provide a formidable battlefront, many photographers declared themselves free from painterly pretensions.  They embraced the clarity, detail, and directness of the camera and announced, both through their work and their various manifestoes, that theirs was the most appropriate instrument for making art in a modern, mechanical age.

Jane Reece and Edward Weston perfectly represent this period of transition.  Like Reece, Weston began his career within the hothouse world of pictorialism.  Both photographers favored softly focused scenes of dewy morns, nymphs at pond-side, portraits sensitive to the point of pain, and delicate exercises in “modern” composition.  Indeed, the two were acquainted and exchanged letters and pictures.  Reece never moved more than a modest distance away from her pictorialist values, but Weston experienced a genuine epiphany.  He rejected utterly his early work and destroyed all of it that he could.  For the rest of his life his ideal remained the sharply focused, infinitely detailed, full tonal scale, large format, straightforward photograph, the only kind of image that could exemplify, for him, the purest and most noble function of the medium.

 

HAROLD EDGERTON
“Football Kick”, 1938

and

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE
Plate 177 from “Animal Locomotion”, 1887

The light we see represents only a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  We know about the rest of that spectrum (infrared and beyond in one direction, ultraviolet and beyond in the other) because we have instruments that can inform us of what we cannot see.  A roughly analogous spectrum of time may be said to exist, one in which our senses can perceive only a small section of the whole.

We have all seen time-lapse movies in which flowers grow from seeds to green shoots to full blooms in less than a minute.  Quite clearly, the world changes constantly, but much of that change occurs at a rate we barely recognize in terms of our normal perception of time.  This becomes even more apparent when we consider units of geological and astronomical proportions.

Going the opposite way, we find that normal human limits of time awareness become unreliable and even imperceptible in the vicinity of one second.  We are no better equipped to observe high speed events than we are to see the growth cycles of flowers or mountains or stars as continuous developments.  Just as the camera can radically compress long periods of time, so it can expand extremely short periods.

Eadweard Muybridge started upon a fascinating study of human and animal locomotion after he ingeniously resolved the question of whether or not all four of a horse’s feet are off the ground at any point in it running stride.  (The answer is yes, but only when they are all tucked underneath, not, as many believed, sticking straight out fore and aft.)  In order to discover this, he employed a series of cameras to make sequences of pictures.  Not only did he reveal for the first time the anatomy of movement, he began the process of making what we still call motion pictures.

Dr. Harold Edgerton moved the photographic study of motion a quantum leap forward through his invention of the stroboscope.  Using this instrument to create exceptionally brief pulses of intense light, a photographer can dissect time into remarkably small units and reveal a world that simply does not exist to our unaided eye.

 

DANIEL RANALLI
“Line Bundle #8”, 1982

The simplest and most oft used way to demonstrate how light sensitive materials work is to make a photogram.  Basic photography courses nearly always begin by putting a piece of photo paper down in the darkroom under an enlarger, placing the contents of someone’s pocket on the paper, and turning on the enlarger for a few seconds.  The paper is developed and the areas that were beneath the coins and keys remain white while the parts that were struck by light turn black.  Very quickly after such a demonstration and a few experiments, photograms are forgotten in the rush to make images on film in cameras, to do “real” photography, it is often said.

But the photogram is every bit as real a photographic process as a snapshot or a Zone System fine print.  Only a very few photographers, however, have given it serious attention as a way to make images with their own merits.  A photogram can possess qualities that are unobtainable in any other way.  It can tease us with spatial illusions and amaze us with the most subtle, smooth gradations of tone.  At their best, photograms can suggest that the simplest form of making images with light, silver, and chemicals may yet remain one of the most challenging and rewarding to explore.

 

WALKER EVANS
“Coal-Dock Workers, Havana, Cuba”, 1932
“Clear Hill School, Alabama”, 1932
“Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead”, n.d.

The term “document” suggests authority, something official that could hold up as evidence in a court of law.  In fact, photography has been used from its earliest days as a means for making records that are considered unimpeachably truthful.  William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the medium’s inventors, recognized the value of photography as a means for inventorying property.  The Paris police used photographs to identify and subsequently to prosecute and execute participants in the Paris Commune of 1871.  Photographs we describe as documentary have shown us pyramids and the

Parthenon, living conditions of the poor, and a fabulous quilt of images from space.

The intrinsic veracity of the camera has always been the primary characteristic of photographs and it could be argued that virtually every photograph is a document, that is, an accurate, verifiable depiction of whatever was in front of a lens.  Some photographers have emphasized this apparent objectivity while others have given more attention to the subjective elements involved in making pictures.  Walker Evans very consciously and astutely employed what he was careful to call a “documentary style” in his work.  He was well aware of the fact that he was interpreting his subjects, that he shaped his work and the viewer’s perceptions through his own compelling vision.  But he followed scrupulously the dictum of Flaubert, whom he greatly admired: “The author in his work must be…present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

 

EUGENE SMITH
“The Walk to Paradise Garden”, 1946

• Eugene Smith’s purpose was to touch people’s lives through his pictures.  He believed in the potential of photographs to change the world.

Smith’s experience as a photographer in WWII ended when he was physically and emotionally shattered in combat.  During his long and painful recuperation he did not know if he would ever photograph again.  With the bravura and sense of theatre that marked his entire career, he determined that, if he could not make a good picture on the first roll of film he exposed as he approached full recovery, he would give up photography.  (Smith never hesitated to pull out every stop in telling a story that would contribute to the legendary status he obsessively constructed for himself.)

“The Walk to Paradise Garden” show’s Smith’s very young children apparently passing together into a future of light and leaving behind them without a backward glance a cavern of darkness.  Smith chose, of course, to resume his work as a photographer.  He proceeded to permanently alter our perception of what a photographic essay can become and he provided the very model of the so-called “concerned photographer.”  “The Walk to Paradise Garden” became the centerpiece for the enormous and influential exhibition “The Family of Man.”  Along with that show, it has come to represent both the quintessence of touching hopefulness and the epitome of maudlin, kitschy sentimentality.

 

IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM
“Morris Graves”, 1950

and

EMMET GOWIN
“Nancy, Danville, Virginia”, 1969
“Edith, Dayton, Ohio”, 1970
“Ruth and Edith, Danville, Virginia”, 1966

We expect a portrait to show us what someone looks like.  The camera makes it seem a simple enough matter to obtain an accurate likeness.  But think how quick we are to judge pictures of ourselves or of those we know well.  “That doesn’t look a bit like me.”  “This one looks exactly like Bob.”  If the camera is a guileless, truth-telling instrument, how is it that we are so discriminating about which pictures are “right” and which are not?

Perhaps more clearly than with any other type of picture, portraits make us aware of the wide latitude for interpretation that exists for both the photographer and the viewer.  For some photographers the goal is to make pictures that are as barefaced as possible.  The model for their efforts is something akin to the police station mug shot in its absence of flattery and its premium on unadorned factuality.  Perhaps Richard Avedon’s personal work is the most striking example of this clinical approach.

Other photographers attempt to depict the spirit or character of their subjects, exploiting devices of lighting and expressive gesture or utilizing specific environmental details to provide contextual clues about the vocation or the inner life of the person before the camera.  This is clearly seen in Imogen Cunningham’s portrait of Morris Graves.  The artist’s mystical, dreamlike paintings are evoked in this image of their maker.

Emmet Gowin’s early work centers on his wife, Edith, and her family.  These pictures also interpret, but they do so through the borrowed device of snapshot simplicity subtly combined with a sense of theatre.  They transcend their apparently naive origins and carry us into the realms of allegory and the collective unconscious just as surely, perhaps even more so, than more obviously calculated efforts such as we find in the Cunningham portrait of Graves.

 

JOEL MEYEROWITZ
“Porch Series, Provincetown, Massachusetts”, 1977

Sometimes one of the most important aspects of a painting or sculpture is a celebration of materials and processes themselves.  From the very first daguerreotypes, photographers have been absorbed by the detail and tonal gradations that are intrinsic to their medium.  In recent years, advances in emulsion chemistry have made available to the photographer an exceptionally rich and subtle range of color as well.

We do not look to Joel Meyerowitz’s lush, large format photographs of Cape Cod for social commentary or the latest news from the aesthetic avant-garde.  They owe about roughly equal debts to color field painting and calendar art.  Among other things, they raise the question of whether or not color photographs can ever escape associations with mere prettiness and/or popular culture.  Meyerowitz’s Cape Cod pictures are highly attractive and they make superb use of the palette of colors that Kodak has packaged in their films and papers.  They are also insightful explorations of form and time.  Yet they remind us as well that the picture postcard and the fine art image can be, in some respects, close relatives within the family of photography.

 

RON GEIBERT
“Amateur Night, Todd Art Theatre, Dayton, Ohio”, 1984
“Cheerleaders, Dayton, Ohio”, 1983

Photographers as different as Edward Weston and Ralph Gibson have emphasized a quality of reduction in their work, a pared down simplicity that serves to intensify seeing by concentrating it on a few elements defined with a striking sense of form.  This is most often, though not exclusively, accomplished through the use of black and white materials and through the controlled isolation of subject matter.

Other photographers have chosen to work with fewer strictures, preferring to enter the arena of the apparently haphazard, the world of rapidly changing events which are seen and photographed with the quickness of a glance.  Theirs is an almost peripheral, fleeting vision that is placed by the camera unexpectedly at the center of our eye.

This reflexive technique finds its most natural subject matter in the frenetic life of city streets and in the tumult of public events.  Many photographers who shoot quickly at the passing scene choose wide-angle lenses that emphasize rather than diminish a sense of chaos.  A flash is sometimes employed, not only to provide enough light, but also to add to the feeling of an instant snatched almost at random from rushing time.  The use of color in these circumstances, with its additional dimension of information, provides one more element that can cause the whole process to teeter on the brink of uncontrolled confusion.  But it is precisely this volatile mix of technique, form, and content that provides the excitement for both the photographer and the viewer.  We observe perilous balancing acts performed with such perfection that they appear to be a succession of astonishing and wholly unlikely accidents.

JOSEPH JACHNA
“Iceland, South Coast”, 1976

and

RAY METZKER
“Chicago”, 1959

 

Joseph Jachna and Ray Metzker, in their different ways, exemplify a particular direction of photographic vision and experiment.  The work of both men supports the proposition that diversity and vitality can continue to evolve from the influence of a singular school of thought.

We can trace the work of these photographers in a direct line through two of their teachers, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, to the equally influential though more eclectic figure of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.  One of the leading exponents of experiment and synthesis, Moholy-Nagy sought to infuse a variety of disciplines, including photography, film, collage, graphics, and book design with his fresh, often startling, and iconoclastic creativity.  Callahan and Siskind, who were hired by Moholy-Nagy to teach at the Institute of Design in Chicago, were also keenly interested in exploring unconventional ways of making pictures and in giving new life to traditional approaches.

Jachna and Metzker have carried forward the concept of interfering with and expanding upon the process of making images through photography.  One of Jachna’s many experiments involved holding a small mirror in his hand and extending his arm to place the mirror in front of his camera, where it was close enough to be out of focus when the distant view was clear.  In this way, shapes and reflections merge with the background and a new, strange, and ambiguous landscape appears.

Metzker became fascinated by the inherent capacity of photographs for repetition and by the close juxtaposition of one image to another.  Beginning by printing two adjacent frames from a roll of film, he expanded into the possibilities of image grids, of rhythms and patterns and what happens when pictures take on, through multiplication and variation, new forms that are markedly different from their simple origins.

EUGENE ATGET
“Eclipse”, 1911
“Street Musicians”, ca. 1915

and

HARRY CALLAHAN
“Eleanor, Chicago”, 1953

and

EMMET GOWIN
(see entry under Imogen Cunningham and Emmet Gowin)

 

“Snapshot” is a term originally borrowed from hunting.  Walking through a field and seeing a bird suddenly fly up, the hunter would respond in a single motion, raising his gun, aiming, and firing before the bird had mounted more than a few yards into the sky.  The accomplished snapshooter embodied an optimum blend of rigorously disciplined skill, spontaneous, intuitive action, and the grace to fuse those attributes.  Now, of course, we think of snapshots as the most naive and simple sort of pictures, artless, made with little thought and utterly unimportant to anyone not directly involved with their subjects.

Several of the finest photographers have had the genius to see the directness and simplicity of the snapshot as one of photography’s greatest gifts.  They have realized that, with the right combination of discipline and intuition, they could invest their work with the extraordinary freshness that appears in the most naive of pictures.  They could illuminate for us the parallel worlds of innocence and wisdom through photographs that mingle tenderness and revelation.

FREDERICK SOMMER
“The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and Infant St. John the Baptist”, 1966

 

Creation and discovery are two words that describe the same phenomenon seen from different perspectives.  The activities of finding and making merge, and it becomes impossible to say where one leaves off and the other begins.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in photography.

Frederick Sommer is comfortably at home in the prickly province of paradox.  He is a man given to complex observations of seemingly simple subjects and the ability to penetrate swiftly to the clear heart of the apparently obscure. He collects disparate objects, a lump of metal, for instance, and illustrations from old books, and keeps them around, often for several years.  At some point, as if of their own will, things come together; relationships are created/discovered, a photograph is made.  There in the photograph these ostensibly unrelated fragments appear as a surrealistic cartoon of and commentary upon a famous work of art. Frederick Sommer makes/finds his pictures and charges them with the energy of his profound intelligence.

CLARENCE JOHN LAUGHLIN
“The Masks Grow To Us”, 1947

 

Distinguished New Orleans gentleman, world class book collector, local historian, scholarly surrealist, gothic fabulist, and irascible self-aggrandizer, Clarence John Laughlin was also a photographer with a singular way of seeing.  His pictures are inhabited by apparitions and phantasms.  They provide vivid evidence of a sensibility that rejects the idea that anything is merely what it appears to be.  The spirits that haunt Laughlin’s pictures taunt our assumptions that the world is plain to see and that photographs are objective records of things.

In all his work, including the architectural photography he did to earn a living, as well as his personal, creative imagery, Laughlin remained steadfast in his discipline of simplicity: one camera, one lens, one type of film, etc.  Edward Weston, another photographer similarly rigorous in his approach to technique, visited Laughlin during his Guggenheim-supported travels.  Laughlin introduced Weston to the world he knew so well along the southernmost reaches of the Mississippi.  Both men photographed the same places, but Weston’s pictures are clear depictions of landscape and precise details of the remains of antebellum glories.  Laughlin’s photographs, on the other hand, are dreams haunted by metamorphic and metaphoric figures that dissolve and change before our eyes.

WAYNE LEVIN
“Sea Dreams”, 1983

 

We have all seen surfing pictures: enormous, curling, turquoise waves; clear blue sky; glistening yellow, red, orange surfboards; bronze bodies; blond hair.  When Wayne Levin photographed surfers, he chose to ignore these staples of glossy magazines, advertising, and the poster market.  He took an underwater camera loaded with black and white film and went below the surface, literally and figuratively.  Instead of superficial glamour, we discover genuine drama and a sense of mystery that hints of mythology and evolution.  Levin’s photographs, made only a few feet beneath the familiar, airy world, take us into another universe entirely, one in which men are as graceful as fish and as weightless as angels.

PAUL STRAND
“Cristo with Thorns, Huexotla”, 1933

 

Lewis Hine, the great social documentarian and reformer, introduced Paul Strand to photography.  Alfred Stieglitz, the one-man, avant-garde, cultural revolution, opened his eyes to the modernist, aesthetic potential of the medium.  Strand embraced the message of his second mentor and never looked back.

One of the products of his early maturity was “The Mexican Portfolio.”  This collection of portraits, still-lifes, and architectural details is known almost exclusively through gravure editions, i.e. not silver photographs but ink prints so exquisitely made that they come remarkably close even to Strand’s uncompromising standards of image quality.  After “The Mexican Portfolio,” much of Strand’s life was spent in lengthy visits to various parts of the world.  Other portfolios followed from the Outer Hebrides, from a small Italian town, from France, Egypt, and Rumania.

By his own reckoning, Paul Strand was one of the giants in the history of photography.  His output was vast and his vision was powerful.  His belief in the intrinsic superiority of the straightforward, large format image was resolute and absolute.  Some may deem it irreverent, but one might reasonably regret that Strand became both ponderous and redundant.  “The Mexican Portfolio” became something of a model for most of his later work.  Perhaps he was so convinced of his own superiority that he felt it unnecessary to continue growing.  The best work, and there is much of it, remains truly great.  But the evolution we have reason to expect in an artist seems to have slowed quite radically not long after the wonderful work from Mexico was completed.

SALLY MANN
“Jessie Bites”, n.d.
“The Last Time Emmett Posed Nude”, n.d.

 

Sally Mann’s photographs of twelve-year old girls, which are the subject of her recent book, At Twelve, explore the mysterious, frightening, and powerful process of coming of age.  These are photographs of lives in transition, of awkwardness and grace, innocence and sensuality.  Mann’s sensitivity to subtleties of posture and gaze and her superb command of the medium combine to give us a compelling vision of metamorphosis.  Her photographs evoke the time of awakening in which a woman emerges from a child and both aspects of her life may be seen together.  Such a direct look at such a confusing and potent time of passage can sometimes be disturbing and painful, but Mann’s photographs are also consistently beautiful, tender, and suffused with deep understanding.

Mann is now preparing a book about her own children, and the new work continues to reveal her capacity for both disturbing insight and remarkable beauty.  Two pictures from that forthcoming book have been loaned by the artist for this exhibition.

WILLIAM CLIFT
“Factory Butte, Utah”, 1975

and

MARK KLETT
“Fallen Cactus – New Golf Course, Pinnacle Peak, Arizona”, 1984

 

Photographers might do well to impose upon themselves a brief (twenty years?) moratorium on making landscape photographs in the American West.  From O’Sullivan, Jackson, Russell, Watkins, Muybridge, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, and countless others, we have had perhaps a surfeit of pictures representing the wide open spaces of what was, not long ago, the rugged frontier of white, European settlement in this country.

Two viewpoints dominate this vast catalogue of photographs: the ultra-romantic, hand-of-God, operatic, “sturm und drang” school whose principal exponents were painters such as Bierstadt, Church, and Cole along with photographers Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams; and the topographical, pragmatic, austere, “survey” approach characterized by O’Sullivan, Russell, and Robert Adams.  Whichever approach is followed, and to whatever degree they are blended, we encounter in this work a sense of confrontation between what we too readily pigeonhole as “nature” (an untouched, pristine world) and “man” (the corrupt and corrupting creature who is seen as a thing apart from nature).

William Clift’s photograph is a magnificent contemporary version of a 19^th century perception of the overwhelming, grand opera view of the spectacular landscape, a veritable dream of Frederick Church and the senior Adams.  Mark Klett’s photograph shows us, with a gently sardonic nod, the seamy backstage, deflated reality, the fallen props that will no longer support our lovely illusions.  Both images are “real,” but we are obliged to consider the fact that reality is a matter of interpretation.

DOUG PRINCE
“Fireplace and Sand”, 1971-74

 

Everyone knows by now that the camera, in common with the Bible, can be made to say just about anything.  This includes contradictions, exaggerations, prevarications, and any number of disorientations from the compass bearings upon which we commonly rely and which we are fond of calling “truth.”

Doug Prince is a masterful maker of what he calls “blends.”  In these images he combines two pictures so seamlessly that we are seduced into believing that what we see before us must have existed before the camera, just as we see it.  His greatest ally in this gentle deceit is our sturdy faith that photographs can show us only what is real, that they are intrinsically truthful.  Prince’s “blends” are always plausible at first glance; they are among the most effective images one can find for eliciting a viewer’s double take.  Appropriately so, since the pictures themselves are double takes in the most literal sense of the word, clever compounds which suggest that the sum of two solid truths will sometimes be a teasing, ephemeral fantasy.

ANSEL ADAMS
“Carolyn Anspacher, San Francisco”, 1932
“Orchard, Portola Valley, California”, 1940

 

Ansel Adams is, by a wide margin, the most widely recognized name in “fine art” photography.  Who has not seen more than his share of “Moonrise”, “Clearing Winter Storm”, and “Mt. Williamson” in books, on calendars, posters, note cards, and even in ads for major defense contractors?  Adams had the dubious distinction of becoming a legend, a cliché, and an anachronism in his own lifetime.  To many he appeared to be still photography’s answer to Cecil B. DeMille.  Instead of making Biblical epics with casts of thousands, Adams called upon the forces of nature themselves and directed them, through his medium, with the mastery of a consummate impresario.  One imagines thunderous chords from a vast pipe organ, the voice of God rumbling in the wilderness, and silver angel choirs aloft in radiant, Zone VIII clouds.

Most legends are exaggerated and one-dimensional.  Adams has suffered from such distortions as much as anyone.  Many who wish to be perceived as more sophisticated than the average camera club member or the cultural bourgeoisie at large feel compelled to take potshots at the late, great Ansel Adams.  He is an easy target with his unabashed embrace of the nineteenth century view of nature as grand romance and salvation, and his enthusiasm for comprehensive command of photographic technique, neither of which is regarded as remotely relevant to the photo/art world of the present. Perhaps we won’t be able to see Adams whole for a few decades, when we may “rediscover” his work as we have recently found fresh appreciation for his acknowledged forebears such as Watkins and O’Sullivan.

Fortunately, the two Adams pictures in this show provide a different look at the master of photographic grand opera.  The portrait is a stunning example of sculptural form, a marvelous illustration of how to do everything “wrong” with light (according to the standard rules) and come away with something powerfully and unarguably “right.”  The high vantage point view of an orchard is landscape on an intimate scale, a quiet, lovely passage of chamber music instead of a resounding, full orchestra climax.  It is well to be reminded that there is a great deal more to Ansel Adams than the bravura stuff on which his reputation disproportionately rests.