Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/12/04

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Ansel Adams/John Wimberley WAS Mapplethorpe, highquailty porn
From: "Steve LeHuray" <icommag@toad.net>
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 16:36:45 -0500

> on 4/12/00 2:12 pm, Mark Rabiner at mark@rabiner.cncoffice.com wrote:
> 
>> Ansel goes for the big effect. He's not into boring subtlety You WILL look at
>> his images for more than one second.

Johnny Deadman wrote:
>
> There are a lot of his images I DON'T look at for more than one second,
> certainly not in reproduction. AA's technique was such however that when you
> see his images in the flesh there is a kind of hyper-reality about them that
> can completely transfix you. But that is fundamentally a technical effect.
> If you shoot something with an 8x10 camera and make a contact print you'll
> get the same effect. You could call it 'deep seeing', and it can radically
> transfrom the most mundane object. Edward Weston took amazing pix of
> peppers... Ansel Adams made a boring picture of a rose, and a scissor and
> some thread. To me, Weston's pictures were glorious and in many respects
> unsurpassed. Ansel's were... very very sharp.

My exposure to Ansel Adams is fairly limited to looking at his work in
books. And I have always felt his photographs to be nothing short of
stunning while even looking at them in a book.

So what I am wondering, is it possible to appreciate AA on the internet
while looking at a computer monitor, or for that matter anybody elses
pictures? I have yet to see a photograph on my monitor that made me go
"wow."

Steve
Annapolis