Ron Rothbart
I am an newbie photographer dwelling within the San Francisco Bay space. For awhile, I used to be very a lot into minimalist long-exposure images. I will need to have photographed each piling, pier, and bridge in San Francisco Bay. As of late I am into pure landscapes. For me, going out to {photograph} is all the time one thing of an journey. Even when I’ve a plan, I by no means know what I’ll discover. The expertise of the shoot is as necessary to me because the outcome.
Final 12 months, I went to an exhibit on the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco that presupposed to be about “Ansel Adams in Our Time.” The exhibit struck me as odd and disappointing. Together with Adams’ personal work, we had been offered with work that supposedly represented Adams’ “legacy.” Whereas Adams is understood for his inspirational pictures of pure magnificence, these had been pictures of environmental degradation: a burnt forest, vacationers in a Yosemite parking zone, and a spy satellite tv for pc over the wilderness. One picture specifically struck me as reasonably lame: a really blurry image of a waterfall in Yosemite. I’m fairly accustomed to modern nature and panorama images, and I do know that there are some improbable pictures of waterfalls “in our time.” So I questioned why the curators had chosen items like this, so discordant with Adams’ aesthetic. Then I ran throughout the next in a overview of the exhibit: “Some have complained that the exhibit targeted an excessive amount of on fashionable conceptual photographers reasonably than extra acquainted panorama photographers similar to Galen Rowell or Eliot Porter” (Stinson, p. 4). Rely me as one in every of these complainers.
In what follows, I’ll discover what I believe Adams was making an attempt to do, what he considered artwork, and why his legacy was represented by conceptual images within the exhibit (which was not solely on the DeYoung however at various museums throughout the nation). Lastly, I’ll conclude by mentioning some photographers whose work I believe higher represents Ansel Adams in our time.
