Category: Photographers

Ansel Adams is not one of my real favourite photographers, perhaps because his view is both very American and also from an earlier era*; it’s fine to admire what he did (and in many ways I do) but it has inspired too many to try and do the same, and the results are almost always uninspiring and insipid.

I did learn a lot from him, and his ‘Basic Photo‘ series in particular, teaching myself to print from an old copy of one of the volumes that I came across by accident in our local library when I moved to a new home in 1974. I ended up buying my own copy of ‘The Print’ and the other volumes in the series. But Ansel taught me how to print, and it was then a true master-class, though later editions of the work did get somewhat dumbed down.

I sat down at the computer today to write about something completely different, then spent the best part of 80 minutes (I did fast-forward a little) watching  the PBS documentary on Adams that I found on the Peta-Pixel site. As it says, “an elegant, moving, and lyrical portrait” though perhaps sometimes lacking in critical bite about his photography.

After watching it, I went to take another look at some of his photographs, which he also deserves to be remembered for and are too often forgotten, on the Library of Congress site, Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar.

Ten years ago, at the time of the centenary show of his work, I wrote about Ansel Adams at some length as well as reviewing the show, but those features are no longer available. Written at the same time and published in The Atlantic Monthly was a long piece by Kenneth Brower, still available on-line and worth reading.   Among many other things he tells how MoMA in New York censored the show of his Manzanar work, insisting on the removal of a panel by Nancy Newhall referring to a letter written by Lincoln and including the words:

As a nation we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it as “all men are created equal except Negroes.” 

MoMA insisted on the removal of this panel and that the original title of the show be changed from “Born Free and Equal” to “Manzanar: Photographs by Ansel Adams of Loyal Japanese American Relocation Center.“

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*But that doesn’t stop me liking Walker Evans.  I think there is a line between creating creative landscape images and pretty pictures that just sometimes Ansel Adams got the wrong side of. Or perhaps I just prefer the classical to the romantic. Or think it wrong that there were people who failed to realise that Edward Weston was so much a better photographer!

Derek Ridgers was recently interviewed by Oomska on the future of photography, the fourth in (so far) a five part series so far includes Ed Swinden,, George Plemper, Steve Gullick and Philip Greenspun.  Derek, who I’ve known for years is always interesting to talk to, and clicking on the fine portrait of Willie Dixon at the head of his piece will take you to his web site.

When I taught photography it was always a great pleasure when Derek came to talk to the students, who recognised far more of the people in his portraits than I did. But even if my knowledge of the pop scene from the 70s on was abysmal I could see the quality of his work. Too many portraits get published simply because the person in them is well-known, even though the pictures may be poor (and the walls of our National Portrait Gallery have more than their share of such work) but Derek’s work stands out.

Even if you have little interest in such music, there are still some interesting stories on Derek’s blog,  The Ponytail Pontifications,  where among other things you can find why both he and one of his photographic heroes Garry Winogrand “both had deadbolts on the inside of our darkrooms”.

Derek used to come to Framework, one of the photographer’s groups I was involved with in the 1980s and showed work in a number of the shows we organised. We all used to bring work along and discuss it with the group, and he was in some respects our most useful member; when we often wasted too much time in trying to find redeeming features in some of the more vacuous work that some people brought, his comments were generally rather more forthright.  And usually spot on.

The answers to the set of questions posed by  Oomska, “a new, UK-based online arts and pop culture magazine” which began in 2010 tell you rather more about the people questioned than casting much light on the future of photography. Photographically, apart from Derek, the most interesting work they led me to was by George Plemper, who in the late 70s was (like me) teaching as Head of Chemistry in a large comprehensive school. While I took a few pictures (and started a photographic course) he produced a very much larger body of work both inside the school and in the local community which you can see on Flickr. Perhaps the most interesting set I investigated is One moment in time: England 1975-1982.

Imagine going back to your parked car and finding someone had broken into it, stealing not just your camera and lens, but also your laptop and two external hard drives containing the raw files from your last six months of work. It must be one of the worst nightmares for a photographer (though mine is slightly different as I don’t have a car.)

It was Theron Humphrey‘s New Year present when he returned to his pick-up parked in Jackson, Mississippi, where he was half-way through a Kickstarter crowd-sourced project travelling across the USA making portraits of ordinary people, as Pete Brook recounts on his Rawfile blog.

Humphrey had got backers to put up over $15,000 for his project, promising them postcards, signed prints t-shirts and more depending on the amount they contributed, and at the higher end you could camp with him, nominate a person to be photographed as a part of the project or he would tattoo your name on his leg!

While he travels across the USA – and is able to continue with the project thanks to some more generous support when people heard about his loss, with loans from friends and $4000 from a donations page – his web developer Chris Barnes is putting up the work on his web site. There are certainly some interesting portraits in his cross-section of everyday Americans on This Wild Idea.

It’s also a reminder to us never to rely on a single backup of our raw files. Unlike negatives you can easily make a copy, and by storing it in a different location, keep your work safe against catastrophe.  Humphrey is now using cloud storage for his files as well as presumably still saving them to hard drives.

It has always been accepted wisdom in writing about photography that black and white was somehow more gritty, more realistic, more serious in presenting news and reality, and I’ve never been entirely convinced. With almost all the news appearing in colour for some years now, it has long been clear that this particular cultural conditioning is losing, perhaps has completely lost it’s grip on us.

A week ago, Swedish artist Sanna Dullaway posted a message (as MyGrapeFruit) on Reddit  “For my second cakeday I thought I’d show my best colourizations and some restorations that I’ve been doing for fun. Hope you enjoy!” which linked (and still does) to a photo album on photo-sharing site Imgur, although since then her pairs of vintage black and white images – including such truly iconic photographs such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and Timothy O’Sullivan’s Harvest of Death, as well as others clearly still copyright – have been copied to more blogs than I knew existed.

On her web site and her DeviantArt page you can read a statement from her about the copyright problems involved in some of the pictures. In part she says

“Ignorance is not an excuse and I (now) know some of the photos are not public domain but copyrighted. Please note I do not take credit for the iconic photos I colourized, only the actual colouring.”

Later she makes clear:

‘I did not want to “improve” nor “replace” the photos I DID colourize as some of you may think. I just wanted to show you a new perspective of the black & white old world, it used to be in colour, too. I thought famous photos would touch most hearts. Focus on the photos, not me.’

Of course copyright is important, and I try carefully to respect it here both for words and pictures. Her ignorance is not unusual for internet users or bloggers, but perhaps surprising for someone who is setting up in business as a restorer and colouriser of black and white images. That she is using other people’s copyright images and gaining publicity for a business she is setting up makes her offence more serious.  I don’t agree with those who suggest it is “sacrilege” to colour photographs such as Eddie Adams’s 1968 Saigon Execution picture, but it does certainly offend against his moral rights and copyright.  As Adams himself died in 2004 we can’t know what he would have thought of it.

Personally I think it is sensitively done and don’t find it offensive, but it isn’t my picture. But on several occasions artists have asked  to use my images in various ways as a basis for their work. The vital difference is of course that they asked – and paid.

What do I think about them? Some perhaps don’t quite ring true; that Migrant Mother for example perhaps looks just a little too healthy and well-fed in colour, but many I think are improvements on the black and white original.  Of course we can’t know how true they were to the actual scene that was photographed, and one problem with working with colour is that there are often very distracting elements in a scene.

Margaret Bourke-White’s 1937 ‘The American Way’ (see it at Life too, where it is shown more dramatically)  completely changes its dynamics. In the original, the dark and sombre line of flood victims  dominate the light greys of the background billboard, reality against dream, while in the coloured version the bright tones of the poster overpower the dull line. And in reality, someone might just have been wearing a bright red jacket or tie, which would have rather changed the picture.

Now we have colour, and most of the time it makes sense to use it. But a few things perhaps still look better in black and white, and it can certainly simplify some images.  What I find rather silly and sometimes very annoying are some photographers who have never learnt to use black and white who shoot in colour and then routinely (and usually poorly) convert the pictures to black and white thinking that it makes their work more serious as photojournalism.