Posts Tagged ‘ansel adams’
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are time and light”*…
There are myriad ways to understand photography and its history: by content, by style, by technique, by use, by creator…
Luminous-Lint is used worldwide by curators, educators, photography students, photohistorians, collectors and photographers to better understand the many histories of photography.
Luminous-Lint uses 125,613 photographs from 4,030 different collections around the world to create detailed and well structured histories of photography.
Luminous-Lint includes 1,032 distinct, but interlinked, histories of photography that are evolving on a regular basis.
The connections between photographs are critical to understanding and Luminous-Lint includes 14,701 visual indexes to assist.
Explore the histories of photography: Luminous-Lint.
* John Berger
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As we consider the framing, we might send thoughtfully-composed birthday greetings to Ansel Adams; he was born on this date in 1902. A photographer who specialized in landscapes, especially in black-and-white photos of the American West, he was hugely influential both in photography and in environmentalsim.
Adams helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph; was a key advisor in establishing the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a founder of the photography journal Aperture.
His love of photography was born when, at age 12, he visited Yosemite and took his first shots. He became a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, a commitment deeply intertwined with his photographic practice. At one point, he contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”*…
“Machiavelli” by William Mortensen
Anton LaVey was a fan, and so was Ansel Adams who called him the “Antichrist.” William Mortensen was clearly no ordinary photographer.
Born in Utah, William Mortensen spent the formative years of his career in Hollywood working as a still photographer on Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings, among other gigs, before setting up shop in Laguna Beach in 1931. Mortensen’s experiences in the fantasy factory of Hollywood provided a solid starting point for his jaw-dropping exercises in imaginative manipulation. Consciously channeling the Old Masters of centuries past, Mortensen tirelessly executed dozens of astounding portraits and evocative “scenes”—pictures so ravishing that the viewer is often bound to question their status as photographs…
Read more of Mortensen, and see more of his work, at “William Mortensen– the Anti-Christ of Photography.” There’s even more in this short (23 minute) documentary, Monsters and Madonnas:
* Diane Arbus
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As we fiddle with the focus, we might recall that it was on this date in 1839 that John William Draper took a daguerreotype of the moon, the first celestial photograph (or astrophotograph) made in the U.S. (He exposed the plate for 20 minutes using a 5-inch telescope and produced an image one inch in diameter.) Draper’s picture of his sister, taken the following year, is the oldest surviving photographic portrait.
An 1840 shot of the moon by Draper– the oldest surviving “astrophotograph” as his first is lost
“All photographs are memento mori”*…
Tropical Street: tourists walking past shops and restaurants in a tropical setting, Hawaii, USA
Many, many more glances at yesteryear at “Vintage Stock Photos“– all free.
* Susan Sontag
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As we check those photos in our wallets, we might spare a thought for Eliot Porter; he died on this date in 1990. An American photographer, he is best known for his color photographs of nature. With encouragement from Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, Porter turned an adolescent hobby into his profession.
Porter was the first established artist-photographer to commit to exploring the beauty and diversity of the natural world in color photographs. Over much of his career, black-and-white photography set the artistic standard, and he had to fight his colleagues’ prejudices against the medium. But in 1962 the Sierra Club published “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.” That immensely popular book, combining his evocative color photographs of New England woods with excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, revolutionized photographic book publishing, and legitimized color. Its success set Porter on a lifelong path of creating similar photographic portraits of a wide variety of ecologically significant locations the world over.
“‘Meow’ means ‘woof’ in cat”*…
In cliff-side houses like these, some Malian villagers speak an enigmatic anti-language originally designed to fool slave-traders
Criminals, conspirators, fugitives, outcasts– throughout history, they’ve all often spoken “The secret ‘anti-languages’ you’re not supposed to know.”
[Update: further to “I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ‘now’*…,” this wonderful variation, via @PhelimKine]
* George Carlin
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As we watch our tongues, we might send breath-taking birthday greetings to the man who spoke the secret language of the environment, Ansel Easton Adams; he was born on this date in 1902. A co-founder of Group f/64 (with other masters like Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, and Imogen Cunningham), his black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park, helped define landscape photography and establish photography as a fine art.
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