My tutor recommended that I read this article when I was studying at Level 2 and having had it recommended to me by a fellow student following a recent Google Hangout where my work was discussed I felt that it was timely to give it another read. It was written for The New Criterion in 1984 and is in Grundberg's book Crisis of the Real.
Andy Grundberg begins the essay by reminding us that when Ansel Adams died in 1984 he was the best-known and most widely admired photographer in the United States, if not the world. He says that Adams' photographs took on the status of public monuments. He suggests, though, that despite his popularity the nature of his aesthetic achievement is unresolved, going on to argue that he actually aspired to be the world-famous photographer that he became, working hard to cultivate this image. He befriended Beaumont and Nancy Newhall and helped establish the photography department in MOMA in 1940 and in 1977 he provided funds to endow the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellowship at MOMA. Grundberg goes on to inform us that Adams was the author of more than 35 books and was also a figure in conservation circles, serving as a Sierra Club director from 1936 to 1970. Grundberg asserts as well that what made Adams so popular in the public mind was, primarily, his photography, especially those images that portrayed nature as a majestic and indomitable force impervious to the depredations of time and tourism. He says that these images are among the most visually imposing, dramatically printed images of 20th century photography. He suggests that in some ways they have similarities to the retouched images of the pictorialist era yet in most ways they are diametrically opposed to these ideals and are much more in sympathy with the straightforward and richly detailed early Western Frontier views of William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins. Unlike those early pioneers who portrayed the land as alien and inhospitable Adams' photographs made nature seem gentle and friendly. He says that in Adams' universe the moon always seems to be rising and storms always to be clearing, which suggest his modernist optimism for the future of the human spirit.
The downside to this, according to Grundberg, is that it shows us a sanitized world. It never was like that, though in Adams' day as a 1922 to letter to his future wife shows when he complains of the crowds in the Yosemite Valley. Grundberg asserts that, not only does Adams never spoke of the meanings of his pictures, neither does anyone else. Grundbeg says that it is this silence coupled with the absence of any criticism of the work is what has left Adams' place in the art of the 20th Century surprisingly unsettled. Grundberg argues that the person who has come closest to suggesting the nature of Adams' accomplishments as a picture maker is John Szarkowski, director of Photography at MOMA who wrote: " He is the last of those Romantic artists who have seen the great spaces of the wilderness as a metaphor for freedom and and heroic aspirations."
Grundberg goes on to say that the experience of Yosemite depicted in Adams' photographs in no longer ours (and it would appear was not his either) and today's experience is more akin to Bruce Davidson's 1965 photograph of a crowded campsite on the valley floor. More recently National Geographic magazine showed a photograph of the famous viewpoint at the entrance to the valley crowded with vehicles and tourists, far removed from the pristine wilderness of Adams. Although that view is still there, but it is what is beyond and around it that strikes us today. Grundberg expresses interest in the lengths that Adams went in his time to avoid everyday reality both in his subject matter and in his printing style. In his concluding paragraph Andy Grundberg argues that there still exists a longing for the "clean and pure and untouched" spaces that Adams' landscapes depict and he says that in this style of images there is a comfort of a kind entirely lacking in the "man-altered" landscapes of the New Topographics He concludes by asserting that Adams' photographs are valued because they now function in lieu of the scenic wildernesses as artifacts of a lost contentment.
I found rereading this essay very useful for getting me back on track when depicting landscape and nature in Lincolnshire. As the first draft of Assignment 4 shows I have a tendency to portray an idealized view of nature of which I am in awe, both in my writing and my photography. This was pointed out to me by my hangout group and on reflection I had to agree with them. It is easy to walk in the landscape and see only what you want to see in a very blinkered fashion. I returned to the woods and this time ignored the 'perfect, untroubled' nature and looked for that which was darker and made me feel less comfortable. I have photographed this aspect of the land and paired these images with my previous ones to highlight the contrast. These are shown in my third draft for Assignment 4 which can be found here..
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