Ansel Adams, Christopher James and Making Photographs

I've just finished reading Ansel Adams's The Negative and Christopher

James's The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes. Adams appears

to have believed that a photographer should know with some precision,

when he composes, meters and sets his aperture and shutter speed,

what the eventual print will look like. That belief seems to underly

the Zone System, at least in its full-blown cradle to

grave/composition to print, methodology. In other words, implicit in

the methodology is a philosophy about photography.

One of the things that I find attractive about James's book is that

the underlying philosophy of at least parts of it is much freer. This

is particularly evident in his discussions about pinhole and Holga

cameras. I also have the sense that many of the images in the book

were created through a process of tinkering and experimentation.

Reading his book reminded me of when I got my first chemistry set.

 

How many people who participate in this forum make photographs in the

deliberate and methodical manner that Adams prescribes? Is his

apparent claim, that adoption of the Zone System largely eliminates

unpredictability when making images with film, born out?

 

For how many is the road from composition forward a process of

tinkering and experiment that results, at the end of the day, in a

print that was unforeseen, or only partially foreseen, at the outset.

If you are in this category, is is a result of imperfect craft or a

deliberate choice? If it is a choice, do you use the Zone System and,

if so, what parts of it and for what purpose?

 

If you use an alternative process, do you use some kind of Zone

System equivalent? Is that even possible, given that a degree of

unpredictability seems to be inherent in some alternative processes?

Or is experimentation a central part of mucking about with

alternative image capture (e.g. daguerreotypes) and alternative

printing processes?

RJ;

 

I have never calibrated my personal photographic system using the full-blown zone system; however, I do get frequent "good" negatives; good enough to print well.

 

I also am an avid pinhole photographer. For us 'pinholers', there is much more experimentation and serendipity involved in the process, if for no better reasons than: lack of viewfinder, reciprocity failure in exposures, long time exposures (blurred subjects), orthochromatic tones of paper negatives and making deliberate compositions that take advantage of extreme depth of field.

 

Conventional photography may explore one or two of these issues in the experience of taking any one particular image; pinholers frequently are faced with the whole gamut of challenges at one sitting.

 

Experience proves, however, that given enough time with the materials, especially with using the same camera(s) and paper/film over and over, that these serendipitous moments become more predictable; even, dare say, controllable. Within the limits of the medium, of course.

 

That is perhaps one of the more enjoyable aspects of the pinhole craft: a controllable, calibrated serendipity.

 

I may also mention that there are extremes of approach within the pinhole community. If I may be so bold as to categorize: there's the 'free-wheeling, artsy, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-gut' approach, which becomes an iterative dialog with the materials and methods. Then there's also the 'left-brained, math-whiz' approach.

 

This latter type, of which I am in a 12-step program to overcome, believes that there are no unknowns in the pinhole process that a good scientific calculator and Excel spreadsheet can't overcome. We're the type that wants the reciprocity curve for every film and paper ever made. We have endless boxes of test exposures from our latest camera. Someday, we'll get around to actually doing photography, rather than building new cameras and doing tests.

 

Lately, I've taken more to actually using these tools, rather than just test them out. But that's another side of the craft worth documenting: homemade camera building becomes very addictive. And very rewarding.

 

As for forseeing the results before hand, my experience with pinhole is that there's a partial seeing, a partial knowing; one obscured by clouds, but which, occasionally, clear just long enough to allow a glimpse of truth.

Adams was a dictator. What always suprises me was that he was part of the movement which broke free from the constricting dogma of pictorialism only to create his own repressive directives.

I have never been able to adhere to a disclipline. I tend to pursue photography with the same voice that I pursue music, relying on my talent as an improviser to escape the limits of my capacity to analyze and control.

 

I have some very basic skills that I can use very predictably. On my musical instrument, I have all the usual scales and chords but have always had a strong aversion to thinking about them too deeply. If I stop playing at any particular point, I could splay out whatever I am doing like a lab rat on a table and tell you what is going on, but I find it very hard to do that withoug killing the groove. When I have tried to set up a session with an intellectual model in my head, it only serves as a starting point and the real joy is in what develops spontaneously from it. I find it utterly stale to try to jam with people who just play songs.

 

This is really a perfect analogy of how I make a print also. When I am shooting, the technical aspects, exposures and reciprocity and such, are just like scales and modes and harmonics in the music. I need to know them well enough that I don't need to think about them. I try not to think while I shoot, but rather to see the world in an active and engaged way and to essentially jam with it. Same in the darkroom. I tend to use the same chemicals and papers over and over again so I can just switch off my analytical brain and experience whatever is in the negative as an active, energetic, interactive force.

 

I see Ansel Adams as playing Brandenberg Concertos, which I love and admire. I aspire to play like Coltrane or Hendrix, though, and feel like a stuttering idiot when I try to play Bach.

Zone System,hmmm...<p>

 

I like this quote from Feininger in his book "Light and Lighting in Photography":<p>

 

<i>...the so-called Zone System ... makes mountains out of molehills, complicates matters out of all proportions, does not produce any results that cannot be accomplished more easily with methods discussed in this text, and is a ritual of cult rather than a practical technical procedure.</i><p>

 

And I agree with Andy

No. Never.

 

The ZS is scientifically unsupportable. "The Zone Syetem Manual" by Minor White would be laughed out of a philsophy of science classroom.

 

It is a book that should not be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

 

The ZS cripples normal creative responses and substitutes dogma for vision.

 

Film is very forgiving if you treat it right.

 

HB

Ansel Adams also liked to say that "the negative is the score and the print is the

performance" to use a music metaphor. And he markedly changed the way he

printed many of his most popular images over the years to a create strikingly

different "performances".

 

Take all received wisdom with a grain of salt.

<i>the negative is the score and the print is the performance</i><p>

 

An odd analogy if you think about it, the vast majority of musical performances (that come from scores) are performed by people who didn't know the person who wrote the score.

The zone system worked for Adams. He could visiualize the thing the whole way through. But a great many photographers can not and unless they are in control of all parts of the process visualizing it is no good anyway. I think rather too many people have made themselves slaves to the zone system - and produced fewer good pictures as a result. Quite a few don't realise that copying Adams' techniques won't make you Adams.

Quite a few of us have no interest in being Adams.

I recently saw an Adams retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum. Not all the prints were great. The images were repetitive. Mostly, boring and dull. Coincidentally, Boring and Dull is the name of my accounting firm. And after I left the show, I had this weird urge to buy a calendar.

 

To answer your one of your questions. I use a meter and my experience along with some healthy bracketing when I feel I'll never see that shot again.

When I started doing large format photgraphy, I embraced the Zone System and philosophy of pre-visualization espoused by Adams. I learned a great deal about sensitometry and also found that the process of creative discovery works better for me than pre-visualization route.

 

I have very few prints that look like I originally imagined they would. Perhaps I lack the experience to properly pre-visualize. Adams talked about pre-visualizing both the tonal distribution and composition. Understood that way, it doesn't sound too oppresive. In fact, if you are interested in learning sensitometery, there is some merit in spending time "pre-visualizing" the tonal distribution in the final print finding what it would take to acheive it.

 

While it is easy to see how sensitometry would burden some people and interfere with the creative process, for me, its application in the field and darkroom has simply become an additional tool. It is neither a burden nor guarantee for success. If you learn it well enough, you don't have to think about it much.

 

Not all photographers embrace the technical elements of the craft and some, in fact, find them an intrusion. If they suit you, fine. If they don't, fine. It is sometimes wise to try the methods of others on the the way to discovering your own.

I like the methods of William Klein and Daido Moriyama. Both are intensely involved with how their prints look in the end, but neither seems to be wrapped up in a technical definition of a print. The problem is in this statement - "Not all photographers embrace the technical elements of the craft" - and its implication that there is a specific way things should look. I hear it a lot from people who subscribe to the Adams theory of long tonal printing. But people who print with very different objectives for the end result are no less concerned with the "technical elements of the craft."

Jake, your comment is hilarious :) I was quite disappointed the first time I saw an AA print. I was expecting my life to change but it didn't.

 

I'm surprised to see the lack of support for The ZS philosophy as it would have many adherents on other forums or threads. Perhaps ZS practitioners are dying out?

 

I do agree with one of the commenters above that having the benefit of a good knowledge of the technical side of BW exposure and printing is definitely a plus. Also it would be nice if all of us were just born with a gift for it. Unfortunately, most of us (including me) are not this way, but fortunately the dogma, as espoused by the f64 club and ZS practitioners, did not have a pervasive or long lasting effect on photography, or the photographic arts.

 

The fact that AA reworked many of his images later on tells me that pre-visulation may actually work against you. Maybe it would be better to just make a neg that will work in many situations.

If you have seen one Adams pictures, you have not seen them all. If you have seen two, you have....

As pointed out already, during his lifetime Adams revised his ideas of how the final print should look with many subjects. That somewhat negates the philosophy of previsualizing the finished print at the time of exposing the negative. Personally, I consider the Zone System a convoluted way to describe how to "open a stop" or "stop down a bit", depending on the lighting and subject. Exposure ain't rocket science, I ain't a rocket scientist and I still get negatives that print well even when I make exposures by eyeball instead of metering and placing grey values.

 

Although it's now popular to denigrate all things previously considered holy, Ansel Adams deserves better. Few "civilians" would have ever come to appreciate how photography could be such a means of expression without Adams' efforts. I know I first became interested in photography over 30 years ago after seeing some of Adams' pictures. While I've come to appreciate Robert Adams' landscapes more than Ansel's and I now find Robert Frank's muddy Polaroids and Sally Mann's runny collodians more appealing than Ansel's full grey scale, I still appreciate what Ansel Adams did for the craft, art and profession of photography. Still, we live and die by the fashion of the day and, currently, Ansel Adams is not "fashionable".

 

When I make pictures, I like surprises. I know all the technique I need to know to produce a good photograph but that often gets in the way of making the best photograph. I don't want preconceptions when I photograph. Jeff mentioned William Klein as a photographer whose work he admires. In the '50's Klein was said to use "accidents" in producing some of his photographs. He could work with sloppy methods and produce photographs that were more effective than if he zoned his exposures, developed for N +/- and printed for a full tonal range. A little heart goes a long way.

What about John Sexton? He seems to be popular. Personally, the stuff he produces I consider to be kitsch.

I'm always surprised by the vehemence of the anti-zone system feeling. The zone system looks to me to be not a whole lot more than obvious common sense: if you want a printable negative, your exposure and development should be such that the areas you want to see are exposed sensibly.

 

Maybe Adams' work has become trite and over-emulated, but (at least some of) the stuff he and the f/64 folks were reacting too (seriously tacky staged studio stuff) really was kitch.

 

I suppose icons are there to be smashed, but I really don't see the point in it...

"If you have seen one Adams pictures, you have not seen them all. If you have seen two, you have...."

 

Well, he was no Hans Beckert, that's for sure. But not all of us can be perfect.

Regarding the Zone System: it's a way Adams devised to explain sensitometry to the average photographer. Of course experimentation by oneself is the best way to proceed and there's no need to be dogmatic about anything in photography (unless that is the primary selling point). Besides, it can be fun..unless you happen to inhale mercury fumes while making those daguerrotypes.

 

Being methodical is fine when it's possible but not when it interferes with the primary goal of the photograph, unless the method is the goal. Adams was perhaps original and interesting for his time but one can't expect a follower today to generate the same interest or impact that he did.

 

I find it curious that many photographers are so dogmatic about how a photo should be; quite an incomprehensible attitude in the other arts.

David Littleboy (Tokyo, Japan) , jan 21, 2004; 09:55 p.m.

"I'm always surprised by the vehemence of the anti-zone system feeling."

 

Kansmen say the same thing about their cult.

 

"The zone system looks to me to be not a whole lot more than obvious common sense:"

 

Yes, just as lynchings made sense to a lot of people...

 

"if you want a printable negative, your exposure and development should be such that the areas you want to see are exposed sensibly."

 

"Maybe Adams' work has become trite and over-emulated,"

 

What zone are white sheets?

o-boy, lets welcome another real charmer to photo.net

Talking to zonites is like talking to klansmen. All they talk about is 'blacks' and 'whites'.

When I have the time, I use the Zone System within the capabilities of 35mm film and 120 film...........meaning, I rarely get the opportunity to fully utilized the developing contraction and expansion....but, have on occasion justified some wasted frames as far as 120 film goes.<br><br>

 

I read the Negative after all my efforts tried via instructions from photo magazines, other books, and center weighted metering systems were not giving me the results I wanted. The results I wanted were to be able to see the final print come out somewhat near what I saw (in my minds eye) when i took the pic.<br><br>

 

So, as stated by someone else above, to me the Zone System is a lesson in densitometry in relation to photographic paper. I tend to think of it as the baseline from which to make all my other judgements. If strict adherence to the Zone System produces the perfect scale of tonal range, then if I do this or that with the exposure, I will get this or that tonal presentation in my final "print". And to tell you the truth, i know I didn't think that up on my own, and although I cannot point to the reference material, I believe that even Adams said that. I distinctly remember that he spoke about using the zone system to produce a print that only used zones 0 thru VI. But, even if I am mistaken that it was him....<a href="http://www.library.arizona.edu/branches/ccp/education/guides/aaguide/zonesys.htm">this</a> article's first paragraph and list of bullets tends to indicate the same. It never says in there that the Zone System is a system to produce the 0 - X tonal range.....it simply says that it is a way of forseeing the tonal range<br><br>granted, that may be my interpretation, because that is what I wanted the Zone System to do for me...........give me something scientifically concrete, so that I had a starting point from which to deviate as I felt necessary.<br><br>

 

I also thing that some of the misunderstanding may be that Adams' love in photography was the landscape......and for the most part, is an image that demands a full tonal range.......at least 95% of the time. He obviously didn't strictly use only the zs to take pics........that "Moonrise over whatever?", his most famous, and at one time, if not still, the highest price tagged photographic print ever sold.........was done without a meter.......just pure guess work. He also makes no effort to hide the fact that he manipulates the negative and print in the darkroom way beyond stated zs techniques. So, its my opinion, that the strictness to which he is acclaimed to adhere to the zs is other peoples doing, and not his own. I definitely remember him saying in a book or mag, that he developed the zs as a teaching aid for the most part.<br><br>

 

so, having learned the zs, it has increased my knowledge of the scientific end of this art form to better control and/or alter the final result of the image I want. And.............when time does not allow.........as in street..........i throw a whole lot of it out the window and just spin that +/- exposure dial to my hearts content ;o)....it never hurts one to accumulate knowledge and use it accordingly...............what hurts one is when one becomes a slave to that knowledge.....then it controls you, rather than you controlling it..............just my opinion.<br><br>btw - I like a lot of AAs pics, i like a lot of Moriyama's pics, Kenna, HCBs, Strands, Stieglitz, and even WeeGee's stuff is growing on me of late...................and I doubt if anyone of them use the same method of exposure, developing, and printing their images.

You are right, Adams didn't dwell on "always having full blacks and whites" as Hans states. even Sexton said that when you have achieved a full black and a full white, congratulations! you have just made a test strip!

 

ignorance goes a long way