Saint Ansel, Bohemian Ed Weston, Morely Baer, and others heavily influenced me while I was growing up in southern California. When Saint Ansel wrote something, I took it at face value and didn't really question why he wrote what he did. So when he wrote that "straight" photography was better than anything William Mortensen did (naming names, even) I immediately thought Mortensen was in the wrong and his photography was of little to no value. Further, emulating St. Ansel's techniques and choosing the photography tools he chose seemed to me the best way to proceed. Period.
Years later I learned the photographic world is much more subtle than I originally took it for. I began to appreciate some of William Mortensen's images and started reading through his early Camera Craft books on lighting, modeling, and processing. Over the years I've wondered a bit about the tension between Adams and Mortensen and could never get to the bottom of it. Group 64 had their position and my little world didn't seem to tolerate any different approach.
That's how it appeared to me, at least. Living on the west coast of the US was a very limiting, narrow experience. It was rather arrogant of me, really.
Moving out of the US has had the fortunate effect of teaching me just how broader and wider the world of photography actually is. There are as many approaches to seeing the world and creating unique images as there are photographers pursuing the practice. It seems all so obvious to me, now, but my own borrowed/adopted narrowness got in the way.
Recently I've worked to expand my knowledge of photographers and their contributions to the craft. In the process I stumbled upon a nice collection of pdf files on archive dot org of the early Camera Craft publications. The very first one I read contained a few articles and letters to the editor that I'm finding utterly fascinating. It contains a portion of the history of how photography was still evolving in 1934 and provides pointers to where the schism between St. Adams and William Mortensen originated.
What I'm doing here is providing an article, copied and pasted from a pdf written by William Mortensen that talks about different approaches to photography, and why he feels more value in some and not others. Mortensen provides a critique of soft focus lens use in Pictorial works which is sometime Group 64 seems to have completely ignored. This is perhaps because he provides a direct and strongly worded critique of Group 64. It must have caused a fair amount of gnashing of teeth and wagging of fists and I will share two letters to the editor written by Willard Van Dyke in a future post.
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Venus And Vulcan ~ William Mortensen
An Essay On Creative Pictorialism Interpretations Of Reality
In the days when the world was young and humanity was still in the period of its innocence, Art (if we are to believe Spengler and other philosophers of history) was the result of instinctive and intuitive reactions of joy, fear, and wonder. But, we are told, when the serpent of Sophistication crept into this paradise, man turned crafty and knowing, and Art became calculating, self-conscious, and decadent. Judged on this basis, photography, as the youngest of the arts, is showing clear signs that it is about to doff its pinafore and enter into a swash-buckling, hell-raising adolescence. Among these signs we may note an increasing number of discussions (of which this is one) of the true end and significance of photography. It is evident that a spirit of healthy dissension is abroad in the ranks of photographers, and that where once their one thought was to stand together against the jeers of other arts, they have now sufficiently found themselves to form inner alignments, parties and schools.
When Dr. Draper in 1840 posed his sister under the noonday sun and focused his weird contraption of lenses and chemically treated plates upon her for twenty minutes, he probably had no intimation of the awful consequences of his act of taking the first photograph of a human countenance. To Dr. Draper and the other pioneers photography was a scientific issue merely, complicated by almost insuperable technical problems. It was as a scientific curiosity that the camera made its first public appearance. For years the simple wonder of the fact that this instrument was able to record the simulacrum of everything that its glassy eye beheld was enough to justify it. But soon, even in its quite primitive state, the camera made known its unexampled facility for recording and documenting events; and this was the second stage in its evolution. Then appeared the portentous phenomenon of a man named Eastman. His is the heavy responsibility of making the camera popular by putting it and photographic materials within the reach of everyone. There ensued the era of the "snap shot." Irresistible, indefatigable Kodak army swept round the world, from Eiffel Tower to Matterhorn, from Karnak to Taj Mahal, and wherever they went there was a tremendous clicking of shutters. Events and persons far better forgotten were given a fearful immortality. And this was the third stage.
Early in the snap-shot era the development of photography reached its fourth phase. To the accompaniment of jeers, groans and catcalls from the practitioners of the older graphic arts first London Photographic Salon timidly made its bow forty years ago. That this young upstart, this scientific toy, the camera, should dare to artistic pretensions, was to painters, etchers, lithographers, a jest of epic proportions. And to tell the truth there was much justice in their merriment, for the early salons were mostly shots. made up of pictures that were in essence simply superior snap-shots. But amongst them all were a few prints that, by reason of their imaginative quality, stood out against the Olympian laughter of the Academicians.
Aside from the manifest shortcomings of taste and artistic training betrayed by the first salons, the thing that most drew the fire of critics was the essentially mechanical nature of the camera itself. "The camera is merely a recording instrument," they said, "and has no more to do with art than a thermometer or a stethescope. It is like an idiot's eye: it sees
everything and is incapable of saying anything about it." Stung by this rebuke, the early pictorialists began doing everything in their power to conceal the clean lines of their images. They diffused their pictures till all their forms sprouted whiskers of cotton wool. They indulqed in various ill-advised efforts to imitate paintings of the boudoir school. They abused the gum-bichromate process so that their pictures lost all sense of definition and most of the half-tones.
Despite the many departures from good taste and good sense and the uncertain technique of these pioneers of pictorialism, the quality of the work exhibited in the salons gradually took on substance and dignity, the clamour of the critics became less strident, the public became more generous in its recognition, and what was most important, the photographers shed their crushing inferiority complexes and began to take candid stock of themselves. And at this point, which is coincidental with the last few years, photography entered into its fifth phase. Pictorialists, no longer obsessed by what other artists thought of them, began to give consideration to the implications, functions and aims of their own art. Should photography be imitative, representative or expressive? What is the importance of technique? What of processes that are not strictly optical, mechanical and chemical?
The effort to answer these and similar questions revealed a wide divergence of opinion and gave rise to corresponding divergence in practice. No longer is it possible to classify a photographer as simply good or bad, as a portrait photographer, or as a maker of landscapes. For there are now evident several distinct schools of thought and procedure
in the pictorial field.
The fundamental division between these schools seems to be based on their varying methods of dealing with reality. Reality the substantial world of shapes and colours, lights and darks, people and personalities, with which we are surrounded is the material with which all graphic artists must deal. In grappling with this raw reality artists resort to
various methods. To some of them Reality is something to be embraced: to others, something to be moulded; and to still others, something to plunge into and pass beyond.
The first method we may call because it frankly embraces reality-realistic. The realist takes the world as it is. and is damn proud of the fact. The essence of his method is non-selectiveness. All things that choose to record themselves on his negative are equally sacred. Choice of subject is of no account to him; it is the completeness and literalness of
rendition that matters. He lays great stress on the "photographic" quality of his photographs: that is to say, he strives, by all the resources of fine lenses, filters, long exposures with reduced aperture, and super-sensitive film to get onto the negative every thing recordable in the subject, and by means of a contact print on glossy paper to give a complete and objective replica of it.
The principal exponents of this manner of working are Americans, and the chief stronghold of the school is the Pacific coast. One phase of their peculiar technique led to their being tagged the "F. 64 group", a convenient and concise appellation which they themselves have not disowned.
Tested by its results this school fluctuates between commendable sincerity and deplorable taste. I attribute its present vogue to a healthy reaction against the weakly romantic and sentimental trend of early pictorial photography. Its adherents are outspoken and obviously honest in their belief that photography culminates and fulfills its destined function in their movement. They have a clearly reasoned and consistent idealogy and, more than any other group, have recognized and defined their objective. However, my own feeling is that they have set out to harrow a very sterile and unfertile field, and that they will speedily exhaust its possibilities. Though their technical accomplishments are noteworthy, the ideal they have set up of complete literal recording is a very primitive one. A good beginning but not an end in itself. What they offer is a
discipline, and an excellent one; but so far they offer nothing beyond the discipline.
To the practitioners of the second method of coping with reality the material that the world affords respecting it is something to be dealt with creatively, as the sculptor respects the tough marble under his chisel, but not permitting it to dictate the bargain.
The "thing-in-itself" is of no account save as a vehicle of expression. Hence the forms, the lines, the details are all subject to significant simplification and alteration in order that the picture-idea may more clearly express itself. Hence all striving for greater and greater detail, all straining to capture subtleties of tone and texture, even all searching after refinements of technique, are in themselves completely irrelevant to the making of pictures. To the adherent of the Non-realistic, creative manner of working, the finished picture is the be-all and end-all, its own aim and its own justification.
The Classic and Romantic are simply variants of the non-realistic method. Although these two are traditionally represented as diametrically opposed in all respects, they are in fact much closer to each other than they are to the position of the Realist. Their similarities are much more numerous and much more significant than their differences. One may say
that the Classic represents the impersonal, passive aspects of the non-realistic school, and the Romantic, the personal, active aspects.
The classic stripping method subordinates the personality of the away all excrescences of time and place, artist, and, exalts the timeless, universal qualities of the subject. Details and textures are swallowed up in the large conception of the whole. Even where action is indicated there is a sense of repose and balance. Though classic art may find its subjects
everyday life, it stands above the turmoil, remote and austere. Dealing with familiar things, it does not invite familiarity. Egyptian, archaic Greek and, above all, Chinese art typify the classic spirit. But not all the classicists are dead by any means. Echague, the great Spanish pictorialist, is pre-eminently a classicist in thought and method.
The romantic method, on the other hand, exults in the personal quality of the artist's idiom. Rather than exercising restraint, it glories in the exuberant outpouring of forms and ideas. Rich, strong contrasts, both in subject matter and execution, lend a note of excitement. The expressive qualities of line and mass are exploited to the utmost, and the
Grotesque becomes important. Transitory moods and fleeting emotional impressions are emphasized. It is recognizably our world that Romance deals with, but luminated with strange lights.
One misguided and now nearly out-dated manifestation of the non-realistic method in photography needs to be mentioned if only to disown it. This is the Fuzzy-Wuzzy school of twenty years ago. Early pictorialists, distressed by the literalness of the camera, seized with avidity on the soft-focus lens as a means of suppressing irrelevant detail and secur-
ing breadth of effect. Unfortunately, relevant detail was equally suppressed, and the effect was not only broad, but mushy. Soft-focus is still occasionally resorted to; but, now as then, fuzzy forms, indeterminate outlines, emasculated angles, and a weakly sentimental atmosphere are the inevitable results of its use, owing to the essentially non-selective character of diffusion.
What the non-realistic seek is not diffuseness, but increased clarity of expression. To accomplish this, forms must be simplified or exaggerated, certain lines must be given significant movement, tonal contrast must be effectively placed, distracting detail must be suppressed. All this means selection. So the adherents of the creative school will for all
stages of photographic procedure choose the equipment, material, and processes that are most susceptible to control; for it is through control that selection is achieved.
Recent German publications have hinted at a third method of dealing with reality, one in which the unquestionable high technical attainments of the realists may find their logical outlet. The accomplishments of this method at present practiced only by a small group of German photographers are sometimes credited to the F.64 school, but these accomplishments represent a different and more significant departure.
This new method has been made possible by late developments and refinements of optical equipment. I have chosen to call the method "Meta-realistic", because it does not stop with the world as we know it, but plunges into it and passes beyond it into a new world of beauty and fantasy. The camera has a unique capacity for seeing further into a thing than the eye does and discovering refinements of texture, differences of tone, and tiny hidden patterns that neither the casual eye of the average beholder nor the searching eye of the artist suspected were there. The normal eye has a range of sensitivity that extends from the slow vibrations of the red rays to the high speed of violet. The camera makes visible violet even the extremely slow vibrations of moderate heat, and on the end of the spectrum reaches far beyond the eye's capacity.
While these are not things that lie within average human experience, they are nevertheless capable of arousing aesthetic emotion. The thought that there are unsuspected universes within our grasp, limitless fields of exploration no further away than the ends of our noses, is like a cold wind blowing from the spaces between the stars, causing us to dream and to wonder. And so it happens that the work of the Meta-realists is pervaded with the same "strangeness added to beauty" that distinguishes the best work of the Romantics.
At present the only exponents of the true Meta-realist procedure are a few German photographers. They push their optical equipment to strange extremes, not to reveal unimportant detail, nor as a mere technical stunt, but because the result is beautiful. In Das Deutsche Lichtbild, patterns of dew 1933, are published numerous examples of their work drops on grass blades, spider webs, amazing forms of plant growth opening to us a realm of a new kind of beauty, magic and unearthly. The Meta-realists represent a phase of pictorial photography whose very existence is barely glimpsed, and whose potentialities are at this time unpredictable.
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When the foam-borne Venus, goddess of beauty, came to high Olympus, Jupiter, in his quaint way, married the lovely creature to Vulcan the blacksmith. To the superficial critic this union might appear a sad mesalliance; but, by all accounts, the match panned out very well. To be sure, there were a few fearful rows when she called him a dull-witted
yokel that didn't appreciate her, and he denounced her as a frivolous, irresponsible hussy, but on the whole they got along very amicably. Unquestionably she brought light and a new meaning into his dark existence, and he bent all his skill at the forge to fashion jewels for her adornment.
The wedding of Technique to Aesthetic Impulse is a difficult problem. Technique is apt to be over-earnest and self-assertive, and has been known to claim that he married A. I. only in order to make an honest woman of her, a statement which she justly resents. She, in her turn, has sometimes compared her family to his family to the great detriment of the latter. Each has on various occasions packed up and walked out on the other, but they just don't seem to be able to get along without each other.
To study the contemporary relations of this quarrelsome couple will be the object of further articles of this series. A permanent reconciliation may be too much to hope for, but it should be possible to establish a basis for better future understanding.
This is the first of a series of five articles by Mr. Mortensen. Next month he will write on the "Sources and Uses o[ Material". Ed.
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