Digital BW, The Print

At 12:56 PM 5/4/03 -0700, you wrote:
>John,
>
>Thanks for the good response on this issue.
>
>To elaborate on my response to Alan Zinn's 5/1 post:
>
> > I'd love to see a useful, short statement that
> >addresses print v. original film image honesty.
> >Something like:  "Un-altered camera image."
>
>I have used the term "straight" photography for this purpose, and I think it
>represents a genre that is fairly well accepted.  The term may have been
>first used by Stieglitz and Strand, was then strongly espoused by the f64
>group, and made most famous by Adams.
>
>Relating to this, some of the following material may be of interest.
>
> >From the PBS website:
>
>"People have disagreed for decades about photography's essential nature. Is
>it a fine art, equivalent to the other visual arts, or a documentary tool,
>best suited for recording the facts? Some photographers and critics have
>said that photography should take advantage of what lenses do best, and be
>"straight," representing the world as it is. Others have thought that
>photographs must be more impressionistic, or "artistic," in order to be
>successful."
>
>[Numerous quotes on both sides of the debate follow the above and can be
>seen at
>http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/ansel/sfeature/sf_role.html]
>
>"In the years 1915-1917, Stieglitz and Strand were in close contact. It
>becomes difficult to distinguish who influenced whom, but when at the end of
>this period Strand produced a body of sharp-focus work, including somewhat
>abstracted still-lifes of kitchen bowls and cityscapes, Steiglitz was prompt
>to recognize the breakthrough this work represented.... Strand became known
>as an advocate of the new realism called "straight" photography."
>
>[Text from The Encyclopedia of Photography (1984) reproduced at
>http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/strand/strand_articles1.html]
>
>
>"With Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and a handful of other
>photographers, Adams founded in the early 1930s Group f/64, which was
>dedicated to straight photography as an art form. Photography at the time
>was dominated by the “pictorialists,” who created staged, artificial (and
>now largely forgotten) photographs that imitated the conventions of
>painting. Adams was instrumental in the struggle to gain for photography
>recognition as art on its own merits."
><http://www.turtlebay.org/exhibitions/anseladams/pg04.html>
>
> >From the Friends Of Photography website:
>
>"As renowned photographic historian Beaumont Newhall said, "Ansel Adams, in
>his photography, his writing, and his teaching, has brilliantly demonstrated
>the capabilities of straight photography as a medium of expression.""
><http://www.friendsofphotography.org/pastexhibitions.html>
>
>"Throughout his active life, Ansel Adams struggled to master the technical
>challenges of  black-and-white printing so that he could express his
>"visualization," or vision, of the original scene. ... However, Adams was
>interested in much more than technical perfection. "You don’t make a
>photographer just with a camera," he said, "you bring to the act of
>photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the
>music you have heard, the people you have loved." Near the end of his life,
>Adams produced prints intended to represent his life’s work not just as a
>series of landscape images but as a panorama of the possibilities of the
>"straight," unmanipulated style to which he adhered."
>
>[From text accompanying the announcement of a Yellowstone Art Museum show
>"Ansel Adams: A Legacy - Masterworks from The Friends of Photography
>Collection.  From the Collection of Lynn and Tom Meredith. October 4, 2002 ­
>January 12, 2003. See,
>http://yellowstone.artmuseum.org/Past%20Exhibits.html]
>
>So, when people ask what type of photography I do, my response is that it is
>"straight" B&W -- not digital.  It may not be "un-altered," but I think
>"straight" photography as a genre includes Alan's concern.
>
>Paul
>http://www.PaulRoark.com
>
>____________________________________________________
>Paul,


Paul,

The question un-intentionally raised a little dust off old ideas about 
photographic aesthetics. Will "pictorialist" always be a pejorative? :-)  I 
t didn't occur to me that some would construe the mere mention of 
“straightness” as a statement of values.  I tend to use the expression 
“straight” among knowledgeable people but as time goes on it may seem 
anachronistic.  Today everything is understood to be (or suspected of 
being)  processed somehow.

AZ



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