The Ansel Adams Moves

I read a recent article on www.luminous-landscape.com by Alain Briot. He was arguing for greater artistic interpretation in "art" photographs, particularly landscape ones. He described such things as were possible in the darkroom and perfected in the work of Ansel Adams as the "Ansel Adams moves". He went on to cover local geometric distortion, cloning elements and selective colour shifting etcetera as the further alterations that were appropriate now that they are possible.

The gist of his article was that we are all living in the past and should not feel bound by what was done before. After all, what was done before was largely as much as could be done within the scope of the tools available. And, of course, Alain Briot is an artist and does (unlike many luminous-landscape writers) have some attractive and impressive work to back up his words with. Still, it got me thinking if he was right.

I'm not so sure. I feel quite an affinity for the so-called Ansel Adams moves. I feel that art gets power from certain limitations. Is a six string bass always better than a four? Is a synthesizer better than an electric guitar because it can span more notes and make more different sounds? I would say not always, maybe even not often.

Photography is not painting. It defines itself ultimately through the concept of seeing the world through some lens or other. There is a certain implication in a photograph that the picture is related in some fairly simple way to the actual light rays that came in through the lens and formed it. We are happy for a guitar to be distorted, for instance, but not for one of the strings to sound like a piano and the next string like a harp.

The above is a recent picture of mine. It probably has the most "processing" done on it of any photograph I have taken recently. However, they are all "Ansel Adams" moves. It is my hope that the picture still looks natural. As Ansel Adams himself says, once the work that is done on a photograph reaches a level where it is obvious it looses all its power.