Essay on the critical appraisal of Ansel Adams

There is an open question that defines photography theory as much as it plagues it: does a photographer take or make a photograph? Ansel Adams’s 1935 book, Making a photograph: an introduction to photography could well be considered the definitive response. A photograph remains an abstraction, even in its most primitive state as a sort of document or record and Adams’s skill lies in his ability to conceal his role as contriver, abstracter, imaginist, within the rhetorical apparatus of scientifically objective reality. He shuttles, perpetually, between the reality of texture and the affectation of emphasised texture; his is a statement about the difference between something existing and something being noticed, which partly accounts for his famous privileging of black and white. When unnecessary distractions arise from ranges of colours are removed, the impact of an image can be multiplied.

In efforts to define- or perhaps contain it, the practice of photography has been laboriously distinguished from other visual forms and practices, particularly painting and film. Adams is interesting because he refuses the forces of classification, not static enough for photography, too theatrical and contrived for regular representational convention. In the article “Looking at Photographs,” Victor Burgin writes:

The signifying system of photography, like that of classical painting, at once depicted a scene and the gaze of the spectator, an object and a viewing subject…. Whatever the object depicted, the manner of its depiction accords with laws of geometric projection which imply a unique “point of view”. It is the position of point-of-view, occupied in fact by the camera, which is bestowed upon the spectator….
Even more emphatically than painting, photography maps an animated, infinitely subjective and ever changing world into a two dimensional, static image of a finite moment. Classical and highly stylised black and white images, such as those that have made…

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Tags: black & white, film, monochrome, photograph, photographer, printmaking, Zone System

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