Digital BW, The Print

Hi Paul,

Your essay was a tour de force... 

However, it seems to me that AA sometimes is credited with somewhat more than might be totally correct. That is particularly true of the PBS  documetary on his life. Without doubt so far as the general public is concerned, AA was the most influential American photographer of his time. Others in the early days also had an important role to play, particularly Edward Weston.

Well before the F64 group was formed, Edward Weston made the jump from being a pictorialist to a "realist." His photos of the Armco Steel Plant in 1922 or the wonderful pictures of Mexico he made during his fling with Tina Modotti are certainly sharp focused and anything but pictorialist. His seeing is different from AA's but it is magnificent in its own right. According to the Maddow biography, "In the autumn of 1932, Willard Van Dyke, and his wife Mary Jeanette Edwards, her father J.P. Edwards, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Sonya Nosokowia, and Henry Swift founded a group based on Weston's expressed theories. As Minor White put it in his acute analysis (Image, October 1956), 'it meant 'previsualization ... imagining the print while looking at the scene.'" How each of those artists developed their ability to see and how they used these principles is of course different from person to person.

"Straight photography" as coined by Stieglitz is an accurate description but needs, I think,  a sense of photographic history to be fully appreciated and to realize that others than AA contributed greatly to the body of work.

Roger
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: Paul Roark [mailto:paul.roark@...]
Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 1:57 PM
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [Digital BW] Re: un-altered camera image






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