Tuesday, February 26

Today, our focus shifted to landscape in photography. Our discussion started with Ansel Adams. Adams, who largely photographed the American west, photographed the landscape in an idealized manner. Many of his images illustrate his focus on contrasting different shades. These images portray the natural environment as extremely powerful. "Nevada Fall", for example, features a powerful waterful which is clearly in contrast to the rocks that it covers. A majority of the images show no signs of human existence and thus portray the notion of a "utopian landscape".

In contrast to Ansel Adams, Robert Adams features the same American west in a much different manner. Robert photographs the lanscape to show the human destruction of the natural environoment. These images evoke a concern for the environment by illustrating the impact that one can have on nature. His photos show that nature is not only beautiful and powerful, but also can be dismal and bleek.

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
* William Henry Jackson- (1843 -1942) was an American painter, photographer and explorer famous for his images of the American West. Jackson had photographic evidence of western landmarks that had previously seemed fantastic rumor: the Grand Tetons, Old Faithful and the rest of Yellowstone, Colorado's Rockies and the Mount of the Holy Cross, and the uncooperative Ute Indians. Jackson's photographs of Yellowstone helped convince the U.S. Congress to make it the first National Park in March 1872.

*Hudson River School- was a mid-19th century American art movement by a group of landscape painters, whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. Their paintings depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, as well as the Catskill Mountains, Adirondack Mountains, and White Mountains of New Hampshire.

*sublime- is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.

*Landscape art- depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition. In the United States, the Hudson River School, prominent in the middle to late nineteenth century, is probably the best known native development in landscape art.

*Ansel Easton Adams- (1902 –1984) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West. His is known for the zone system in his images where every really good photograph shows range going from dark to light shades…contrast is important. His images show that we are part of a larger universe. “Moonrise over Hernandez, N.M.” is a famous photo where the sky is pitch black and the moon stands out…this shows the contrasts between shades. He also often follows the rule of thirds where land takes up 1/3 and sky takes up 2/3. A lot of his images show no signs of human life (this is a utopian view of nature).

*Group f/64- was a group of photographers espousing a common philosophy. The group was created in 1932. The original membership included Ansel Adams. The term f/64 refers to the smallest aperture setting on a large format camera, which secures maximum depth of field, rendering a photograph evenly sharp from foreground to background. Such a small aperture implies a long exposure and the selection of relatively slow moving or motionless subject matter, such as landscapes and still life over action and reportage photography.

*Straight photography- straight on, documentary, as objective as you can be, realistic, most think of black and white as dominant accepted mode. Refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, renouncing the use of manipulation.
*Zone System- is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1941. The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. The Zone System is concerned with control of image values, ensuring that light and dark values are rendered as desired.

*Robert Adams- An American photographer who began photographing largely in the 1970s. He shot the American west. He shows the impact of human beings on nature. “Untitled Denver” shows how humans have taken over nature…very different from Ansel Adams…he shows a diminished landscape. He also shows boundary between city and country. His images provoke a “green” feeling. Interestingly, his images show a human presence without including people. Although his photos do not have an obvious meaning, they show that nature can be mundane.

*New Topographics- "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" is the title of an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography. The show was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in 1975. It had a rippling effect on the whole medium and genre, not only in the USA, but in Europe too where generations of landscape photographers emulated the spirit and esthetic of the exhibition. Since 1975 "New Topographics" photographers such as Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, and Stephen Shore have influenced photographic practices regarding landscape around the world. This move was clearly illustrated by the subject matter that the New Topographics chose as well as their commitment to casting a somewhat ironical or critical eye on what American society had become. They all depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach.

*Nature photography- refers to a wide range of photography taken outdoors and devoted to displaying natural elements such as landscapes, wildlife, plants, and close-ups of natural scenes and textures. Nature photography tends to put a stronger emphasis on the aesthetic value of the photo than other photography genres, such as photojournalism and documentary photography.

RANDOM CLASS NOTES
-The pastoral- began with the Greeks. There was a distinction between country life and urban living. The pastoral was idealized country where nature becomes a refuge where people escape to.
-This pastoral tradition leads to people starting to claim nature
-18th century landscape painting shows humans possessing nature

*pantheism- to find god in nature
*Rule of Thirds in Landscape photography- generally, land will take up 1/3 and sky will take up 2/3. This creates tension between negative and positive spaces.