Changing New York

I’m offering prints of this work of Berenice Abbott for sale on Fine Art America. http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/lionelf-stevenson.html?tab=artworkgalleries&artworkgalleryid=621168

These prints are offered in a form that is as true as possible to her vision.

The photographs are from the collection of the New York Public Library, an essay “Changing New York”, photographed from 1935 to 1939.

In the winter of 1968-69, I lived with Berenice Abbott in Blanchard, Maine, and made prints for her two exhbits; at the MOMA, and the Smithsonian.

In the winter of 1968-69, I lived with Berenice Abbott in Blanchard, Maine. I went there to make prints for her two exhbits; at the MOMA, and the Smithsonian. She only began to make a living from her print sales after those two shows. I don’t take credit for that, but my contribution didn’t hurt her reputation. I worked under her close supervision, and she made me into a master printer, she being the greatest silver print maker of the century.

That’s heady company, with Paul Strand, Adams, and many more excellent printers.

I know her work intimately, and am a great admirer. We were friends until her death in 1991.

Her portrait of Atget hangs on my wall.

These prints are offered in a form that is as true as possible to her vision.

 

I’m somewhat of an expert at restoring photographs, having restored the most important photograph in Canadian history, the Fathers of Confederation. Prints are available on Fine Art America, http://fineartamerica.com/featured/fathers-of-confederation-lionel-f-stevenson.html, and directly from my website. http://www.cameraart.ca/gallery/fathers.htm.

I believe that historic photographs should be restored to the standard of the time in which they were made, rather than allowing them to be seen as flawed, which they were not.

Berenice was not just a documentary photographer, but an accomplished artist. Working with her, I learned how much she controlled the expression in her prints. The expression was very important to her, although she would say that it was always about the subject. Keep in mind that her presentation of the subject was from her own vast experience of photography, art, and life, filtered through her brilliant mind and large heart. This is not generally known.

She knew that every photograph was an abstract, surrealist object. She lived among surrealist artists in Paris. May Ray was a surrealist, and Berenice knew she did not want to imitate him. He was much more into himself than Berenice was into herself. She was grounded in the reality of what photography was all about. When she saw Atget’s work, there was a “flash of recognition”. She recognized that Atget knew the photograph was an abstract surrealist object, for him, related to the scenes he loved in Paris. Many thought Atget was a “primitif”. John Szarkowski disproved that!

Art vs Things

I am more and more convinced that my work is in a class by itself. 99% of the work I see is about things- the subject.
My work has always been about the print- about the new object that is created. The subject is important in that it is the stimulus to push the button in the first place. However, as someone said, Szarkowski or Borcoman or Minor White, – at the moment of exposure, a new object is created.

Ron Soloman at NFB used to say, “Who has seen the photograph?” Very few ever see the photograph. There is something called a “gloss”; it is a conviction of reality so convincing that we don’t see the medium conveying that illusion. Think of glossy paper. We don’t see the surface, but go right into the image. Many live in a gloss of life; live but don’t see themselves living.

Now it seems to me that the surrealist images we create, (they represent real things, but are really other things), are at their strongest, their most surreal, when they represent those real things and events most realistically. The farther those images stray from accurate depictions, the weaker they are as photographs. Not to deny people their right to have fun with photography. But I’m feckin’ serious!

Berenice Abbott said, “Photography is wonderful, but we must not say so!” We mustn’t say it because it blows our cover.

In my not so humble opinion, after more than six decades exploring it, photography blows my mind!

Magritte was onto it! (This is not a piece of cheese.)

I don’t do photography for fun! I’m doing it because It’s my life, and it’s what I’m doing. It’s one of the ways I question my life.

I’ve seen work that I’ve liked, that has spoken to me, and have considered that work as possible avenues for me, but I can’t do it!

I can only do the kind of work I do. It’s not a limitation. It’s because I’m directed by some force to do the kind of work I do. The only way I sense that force is in what it doesn’t allow me to do. There’s a feeling of satisfaction, or completeness when I make a “Lionel” photograph. And that’s a good thing.

by Henry Holmes Smith

I believe that our primary community is the community of living photographers, masters, teachers, and students. If we do not join together, no one will join us in our major purpose. This purpose is basically to protect photography from further serious impairment.
Teachers, above all, stand between the student and all opinion managers who insolently do damage to the medium. These managers, from all walks of life sophisticated and glib, are utterly lacking in important human motivation. Photography under their patronage is set to piddling tasks.
Such disrespect invites irrational attacks on this half-understood language. Photography’s most important forms (those created and put in use by every generation’s contemporary masters) in large part remain unseen, misinterpreted or sheerly neglected—even by teachers of photography. This also erodes the art and contributes to a degree of student naivete that is unforgiveable today in any other medium. Young photographers are easily victimized by inferior but widely published standards.
Personal exchange (of ideas, pictures, practice and results) between
teachers and master photographers is limited far more by the income of
both groups than absence of desire to meet and talk. Isolation of teachers from one another also cripples photography. Contact between these individuals will help us understand the maverick and otherwise obstinate photographer who, alone, will show us how to abandon some of photography’s most pointless stereotypes.

Unfortunately, teachers are humanly imperfect and must take the
blame that arises from their imperfections. For a generation, photography has been directed at human beings in quantity. At the same time, it suffers from a handicap no living language merits: it has been taught with almost utter ineptness. I think that most of us will understand this from the following analogy; touch typing, in similar circumstances, would be taught under the name of English Literature. English composition, likewise, would concern itself with width of margins, neatness of erasures, and placement of commas without regard for meaning. One cannot teach a language from a position based mainly on applied technology. To reach an art’s history or
aesthetics from this viewpoint is laughable. Only in photography has it been tolerated. Yet ignorance cuts both ways and here the teacher must bleed.
Students of the top-ranking teachers of photography today are coming into notice and their influence is now felt in colleges, universities, and institutes where they conduct classes. This, alone, marks a major advance in the teaching of the art.

BERENICE ABBOTT

In 1968 I was living in Toronto. My wife and I had a flat in the St.Clair area. I had converted one room into a darkroom and was doing freelance work. For the preceding seven years I had worked for various professional photographers in Toronto, and my training in darkroom and commercial studio was good. I had also met many people in the advertising business, and several years of knocking on their doors was beginning to have some effect.

In 1967 I had exhibited work at Expo ’67 in Montreal and had won Canadian Professional Photographer of the Year. Although I struggled to maintain my sense of place in photography, my head was somewhat swollen. Sometimes, I think, success can ruin an artist. I was having an exhibition of work at the new Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, the province of my birth. I travelled there to hang the show and open it, and to spend three weeks photographing on the Island. My best friend from Toronto, Lorne Blunt, travelled there as well, to see the Island and the show.

I returned to Toronto and was back at work on my Island pictures. One evening Lorne dropped in and in conversation mentioned that he had returned through the states and had dropped in to see Berenice Abbott. As he had found out where she was living and wanted to meet her.

I knew who she was. I remembered many of her images of New York and of science, from a time when I had been voraciously reading everything available in the field of photography, Lorne told me she was living in the bush in Maine in a converted wells fargo stage coach
inn, and she was preparing for several shows in major museums and needed a printer. She couldn’t work in the darkroom for reasons of her health. Lorne suggested that I go to see her, and on a gorgeous fall weekend, my wife and I Volkswagened there to see her.

She welcomed us with tea & cookies and we sat down to look at my portfolio and our horoscopes. Berenice was not really serious about astrology, but it was a medium to discuss ourselves and find out if we could work together. We agreed that my wife and I would
come and live in her house. I would work for her four days a week for room and board and a little spending money. The rest of the time, Sue and I would ski at nearby Squaw Mountain, and Sue would help with the housekeeping when she wasn’t skiing.

We returned to Toronto, closed our flat, stored some possessions, sold others including our furniture, packed the remainder in the Volks, and set off for Maine, arriving at the beginning of November.

Berenice’s house was situated on the bank of the Piscataquis River, and the Apalachian Trail passed the edge of her property. She gave us two rooms which looked out on the river, one was a sitting room with our own tv, and the other a bedroom.

The first week was spent settling in, ordering materials, looking at her work and learning her schedule. She would rise early, breakfast and deal with the mail and household necessities. By noon she would be tired, because of her having had one lung removed,
having Emphysema, and being 70 years old, although she always maintained that “age is nothing”. She would have a nap for an hour or two, and then be going again until bed time at nine o’clock. We would retire to our rooms to watch the tube or read.

Her house was filled with American antiques and was decorated, by herself, in an American country style. Her library was filled with first editions of major works of literature, art and photography. Many of them were signed as she knew the authors. On her walls were many photographs, mostly her personal collection of Atget’s. The Atget collection having been recently sold to the Museum of Modern Art. She also had numerous paintings by famous artists, who were former friends and had given her work.

Her studio and darkroom were on the third floor of the old inn, the floor was middle gray enamelled masonite. There were work tables and storage cabinets, filing cabinets, and a pot-bellied stove similar to the stove in her portrait of Edward Hopper. The darkroom was not
luxurious, but well designed. There was an ample sink, and 8×10 cold light enlarger with Goertz lenses, and a point source exposing system for contact prints. There was an array of generic chemicals that I had never used, as well as prepared chemicals, from companies
like Faber, that I had never heard of. Her paper was mostly AGFA, and there was a lot of AGFA film in stock as well.

There were many cameras in her studio, from a robot 35 mm to a 16×20 Deardorff and every format in between. There were many of her inventions as well from the pole-cat and mono pod to the constructions and equipment for making her scientific photographs. There
were stacks of prints and negatives, and a file full of Atget prints and duplicate negatives.

Into this milieu I was dropped, complete with half formed perceptions, hardened concepts of photographic technique and an insular perception of the world. I did not understand this until years later, and mostly because of exposure to a master photographer.

For the first few weeks, while I was making the best prints I could, and I had been printing for some very good commercial photographers in Toronto for five years, nothing satisfied her. I was a good printer, and I couldn’t understand what she was trying to do. It was very
frustrating for both of us. However, when I finally made a print that she was happy with, we celebrated. Then the work went better. I learned an entirely new way of working with the materials. I opened up, forgot about rules and learned to respond to the image and the
luminous qualities that had to be coaxed out of the paper with very fine adjustments of exposure and processing. I simply had to put aside my opinions, understand and accept that she knew much more than I did, and absorb her knowledge without impediment, like a
sponge.

As for my view of the world, every evening when we sat down to dinner our conversation would be about photography, or the state of the world, or the lessons of history. She had seen a lot with her photographic eyes which didn’t miss details, no matter how
uncomfortable they might be. Generally, it was a case of her correcting my misconceptions, errors of perception, and prejudices. I was attacked on all fronts at once. My alternatives were to fly or be broken. I chose to be broken, as there was more to be gained by staying
than by leaving. Although this was a painful process, it opened me to being more an individual and to respond more spontaneously to life.

Perhaps this paints Berenice as a tyrant of some sort. Let me say that she was a patient and loving teacher. When I performed her work well, and was a good student, she was wonderfully sweet. On the other hand, she took her task very seriously, the task of my
education. It was very zen-like; master and pupil. The goal was the transmission of knowledge, which is not an easy task.

Many visitors came. John Szarkowski and other museum people, and some of her many friends from Boston or New York. Usually they were very good cooks, and we had many good meals. My wife and I were always welcomed at these gatherings.

We took turns cooking meals. She was a wonderful cook, and ’really taught me to cook on top of everything else. We made shopping trips to Bangor, drank beer in the car on the way home, and went dancing to country music in Greenville on Saturday nights. Everyone in the place knew her and wanted to dance with her because she was such a good dancer.

Often, Berenice would play records and dance in the living room. She liked the Beatles, Charles Ives, Three Penny Opera, Kurt Weill, Gershwin, the Classics and Loretta Lynn. She loved Kurt Weill’s music. I think she was more impressed by the quality of the
expression than by the genre of the music. She loved the light & happy melodies of Weill and the Beatles, and the true American expressions of Ives, Gershwin and some country music.

The photographers she liked were Lisette, Model, Arbus, Hine, Atget of course, Eugene Smith, Margaret Bouke-White, Helen Levitt, but above all Bourke-White.

Berenice didn’t like Stieglitz. She said he was highly overrated, that he’d produced a few good photographs when he was young, that his equivalents were vague, muddy and meaninglessly subjective, and that he had misled American photography. She didn’t like
Steichen, mostly for the Family of Man exhibition which she thought disgusting in its seaminess. She didn’t like Weston because his pictures were full of sex.

When a photographer is at the top of the heap, everything pulls him down, and all influences must be resisted unless they contribute to the work. This adds difficulty that the mediocre worker never experiences.

During my four month stay with Berenice I made many prints. They were mostly large prints, and I usually made three of each. I could print three negatives on a good day. That is, when I could make three that she would approve. They were archivally treated and gold
toned. This procedure is very expensive. Making prints of a photographers negs is the best way to become familiar with the work. Although my wife and I were just surviving in Maine, the cost of our room & board and a little pocket money, combined with the cost of
printing, was straining Berenice’s financial resources to the limit. By the end of February, the work was all but complete and we decided to return to Canada.

It took the next three years to assimilate what I had learned in Maine. I had adopted something of her strength of vision, and I feel that I was extremely fortunate to have been exposed to this master photographer. Although Berenice had many students, and I don’t
know how much they learned from her, I feel that I was the one to receive the line of teaching that was passed from Atget to Berenice, much like the transmission of Buddhist knowledge from master to chela. I have great love and respect for Berenice Abbot, my teacher and master.

We celebrated Christmas together and had so much snow that we had to shovel off the roofs several times and once had to tunnel from the front door to the mailbox. I’ll always remember the air in Maine. I could often smell the oxygen or ozone in the air in the
morning.

I consumed her library. I looked through her prints and negatives and through Atgets too. I had an enormous appetite for photographs. We discussed photography and photographers every day. Her approach to technique was based on her experience and intuition. On a sunny winter day while out for a drive she would look at a scene and comment “you know, it would be hard to give that picture too much exposure”. She wanted to do a book on birds, on how they use their bills and claws like mechanical tools. She wanted to get a ski-doo and winter camping gear and go to the Arctic in winter to photograph the northern lights. She told me “don’t give your work away, and don’t educate your competition.” Her negatives were beautiful, full of detail, open rather than heavy or blocked, and very clean. She would do outrageous things like hand hold her 8×10 view camera. She knew where to focus and what its field of viewfl was, and what exposure to use.

Once while making up her bed, I found a pistol and a copy of Mau’s Little Red Book under her pillow. I had read the book before, so that didn’t mean she was a communist, (that monstrous thing), just interesting. I asked her about the pistol (more to be feared than the book), and she told me that she had been threatened by a local lout, whose children she fed whenever he was spending his money on alcohol. She said “Governments are more afraid of ideas than guns”. She said the kids lived on hot dogs & coke and the area was backward because the kids brains did not develop properly. The kids came for lunch regularly, and as you can imagine, were curious and incredibly lucky to be admitted to such a genre of art and education, not to mention wonderful food.

Once Berenice told me not to get too friendly with the people in Greenville. She said she had been approached by the C.I.A. to keep an eye on the area and report to them on what was happening in that area. She threw them out. But, she said “you know that they got someone around here to do their dirty work”, I thought at the time she was a little paranoid. One Saturday night, while aprés-skiing in Greenville, I told someone too much about what I was doing there, and the next day, on Sunday, an Immigration officer came to the house to find out what I was doing there. I was studying, as far as they were concerned after that, I trusted Berenices judgement more and talked less in public. However, we had to leave shortly after that incident.

FIFTY YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHS (1962-2012)

Lionel F. Stevenson

available on Amazon.

This exhibition brings together a selection of works from the lengthy career of distinguished Prince Edward Island photographer Lionel Stevenson. Born in New Glasgow, P.E.I. Stevenson was working commercially in Toronto by the early 1960s, and was already showing fine art photography in 1964, beginning with an exhibition at Hart House, University of Toronto. In the late 1960s, he broadened the scope of his practice following a period he spent working under the great American documentary photographer Berenice Abbott. Stevenson recalls that it was Abbott who taught him how to capture a highly personal form of photographic expression, as much through printing technique as through selection of the initial shot, and that aesthetic quality was possible no matter what the photograph’s ostensible∏ function (her own documentary work was closely linked to a political project). One need not make self-consciously “artistic” works to achieve a result both beautiful and true to the vision of the photographer. Stevenson’s unique approach is thus evident here in work drawn from many sources: commercial practice, documentary commissions, and more personal projects, including the images of Peggy’s Cove glacial erratics printed in large scale specifically for this retrospective.

It is Stevenson’s contention that subject matter is largely secondary in the creation of his most successful photographs, The special quality of the medium is that it is forever linked to a real moment, undeniably connected to a particular place and time. But paradoxically, it produces documents that bracket this moment out of the flow of everyday life, severing it from reality through the action of capturing a strictly visual statement, ultimately to land on a piece of paper. Thus, the implication of the artistic photograph as Stevenson presents it is that focused vision, rather than deceiving us, provides us with access to a truth that redirects our usual utilitarian and acquisitive habits of experiencing what surrounds us. The object of his practice is not merely to preserve, but to renew what he captures with a camera, holding out the promise that seeing can transform.

PAN WENDT, CURATOR

THE ISLAND

OUT OF PRINT–NEW COPIES AVAILABLE FROM ME ONLY

INTRODUCTION

Lionel F. Stevenson speaks and works for all of us who are Island-defined when he says, “Sometimes it’s hard to stay awake, everything is so familiar. I’d just become part of it and not look anymore, if I didn’t work to stay awake and aware.”In this volume, his first published collection,Lionel shares his creativity and attention with the people around him by relating and living through his camera in a very genuine way.Stevenson’s black and white work invites a growing depth of interaction, sometimes with just a suggestion in the distance, sometimes in the form of shaded faces or figures that jump out of the shadows once we realize they are there. He seems to prefer photographing in natural, unflashy, but essentially vibrant ways. The people and the landscapes are most often caught in a thoughtful,timeless stance. These photographs are rare examples of the balance of restraint and warmth which so characterizes the concept of’Island’.They are ‘survival shots’ from a time and a place of many austerities and luxuries; the images show why we continue to prosper in body and spirit.Here is a controlled excitement, an independence of interpretation, a feeling of’Here I am, all alone, in sight of this beautiful Island’.This is Lionel Stevenson’s camera art of optimistic realism on Prince Edward Island: we are surrounded by an ocean of limitation and pure open potential in one and the same breath.

KAREN EMILY LIPS
Canadian Society of Landscape Architects

REVIEW

In twenty-eight black-and-white photos, Lionel Stevenson captures more of the Island’s essence than any CBC special ever produced. Oh, the horse and buggy are still there (or here) all right, and so are the dilapidated buildings and cars, but Stevenson sees them for what they are, realities of Island life, not symbols of poverty or pleas for larger transfer payments.
One reality of Island life is contrast, and Stevenson captures this in many of his pictures. For example, a photo entitled “Tignish Run” depicts a fishing boat tied up at the wharf and in the background is an old bait shed, sans windows, sans doors, sans most of its cedar shingles, grudgingly giving way to a new concrete and steel replacement. This same contrast is seen in “Hope River” where the background is a saddle-backed old saw mill and the foreground two mail boxes, one on a wooden stake, the other (with the latest national flag decal on its side) on a newly rust-proofed steel pipe.
The more you study these photos of beaches, pastures, streets, and the working people who give them meaning, the more you will see. I only wish you could see them in colour and in person on Prince Edward Island.
Clare A. Darby, Three Oaks S. H. S., Summerside, PEI

SO MANY PICTURES

This bit was written by Wilson Hicks in 1953 in Aperture. Woe! Woe! for good photography.

(The) public is inundated today by a vast flood of images which, as Lewis Mumford says in his Art and Technics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), has “undermined old habits of careful evaluation and selection.” There is being waged, he reminds us, a horrific battle of man and machine from which the machine has emerged so far as the victor: witness the images mass-produced by still, movie, and television cameras and mass-repeated by the printing press. I say “witness the images,” but you dare not do that. For, as Mr. Mumford says, if we tried to respond to all the mechanical stimuli which beset us we should all be nervous wrecks.

Mr. Mumford asks, (in 1952), whether being surrounded by a superabundance of images makes us more picture-minded, and answers no; we develop an “abysmal apathy” because “what we look at habitually, we overlook.” Moreover, he says, picture users, to get attention, resort to sensationalism—”make sensation seem more important than meaning”— and the shockers so prevalent today cause quieter, and better, pictures to suffer. Still further, the image producers have created a ghost-world, Mr. Mumford says, in which we lead a derivative, secondhand life in addition to our real life. This apparitional world is set and peopled with the artificial and the phoney (note many so-called news pictures). Thus in various ways are the sign and symbol of photography devaluated.

Now if the points I have stated above are sound, and I believe they are, the photographer’s audience is poorly fitted for its job, and what a problem we have on our hands of educating or re-educating it! We can, of course, take heart from one ostensible fact: There is a segment of that audience which is as great as the greatest photography it sees. The problem really is, then, to enlarge the elite group. I say again that I know of no surer way to achieve such an end than by enhancing the quality of the camera’s product and refining the manner of its presentation.

Elders of the Island

O’Brien, Mary, Lionel Stevenson, and Terry Dunton Stevenson.
Charlottetown, University of Prince Edward Island and Ragweed Press, cl985.
ISBN 0-920304-53-2.
Reviewed by Pauline Henaut

1986 January
The full-page black-and-white photographs and the text that make up this book arc part of an exhibition called
“Elders of the Island.” The authors are well qualified to undertake this project. Mary O’Brien is a Visiting
Professor of Research in Aging for 1983-85 at the University of Prince Edward Island. Lionel Stevenson is a
professional photographer whose first book The Island* was published in 1982 by Ragweed. Terry Stevenson is
an artist who has been involved in both solo and group exhibitions.
The book consists of thirty excellent photographs of Islanders between the ages of sixty-three and 103. The brief text opposite each picture is taken from interviews with several of the older persons. Initially, I found it slightly disconcerting that the person photographed is not necessarily the source of the quotation, yet the authors have so skilfully paired photograph and quotation that the one illuminates the other very well.

The authors’ purpose in creating this book is “to capture in photographs and words the quality of present-day
contributions elders arc making to the Island” and “to highlight the often overlooked fact that this time of life, like
any other, is full of challenge and potential.”

They have succeeded very well. We meet thirty men and women who are active in their communities and in the overall life of the Island, among them a weaver, a storyteller, an inventor, a church organist, and farm men and women. It becomes obvious that these elders are in many ways typical of our lively Canadian older persons, and yet are perhaps unusually creative and resourceful because of their separation from the mainland. The use of the noun “elder” to designate this group of people connotes dignity and respect; it also reveals the affection that the authors feel for their subjects.

This sturdy, large-format paperback will be useful with units on aging and Maritime studies. It will also provide
pleasure for browsers. Recommended for purchase by school and public libraries.

Pauline Henaut, Westville H.S., Westville, N.S.

ON PHOTOGRAPHY part 4

Normally, it is not the photograph that we see, but the “subject” of the photograph, its referent. Each photograph states, “This has existed”. Most viewers miss the art in photographs because they get absorbed in the referent.

What you get out of a visit to a museum or an exhibit or a work of art, or a book, or a piece of music, depends completely on what you bring to it. A person who has wide experience in the arts will get more out of it than a first time visitor. However, either will have to approach in the same way if he/she is to enjoy and be enriched by the experience. Each can bring an open mind, and a sense of wonder.

For many years you’ve been using your eyes for practical purposes, (such as to keep from running into walls). To appreciate art, you must learn to use your eyes to feel the qualities of the work. Your experience of life, and your knowledge form a foundation for feeling with your eyes.

The photograph contains the expression of the photographer as well as the subject depicted, (the referent). If the photographer gets lost in the subject, or in the image, he doesn’t develop as an artist. Getting lost in the subject means being so taken by the subject that you can’t see the photograph. Getting lost in the iImage means being so captivated by the image that you don’t see the photograph. The photograph is the sheet of paper which you are viewing.

With digital photography, the final result is most often not a print, but an image in an electronic medium, either digital photo frame, computer, or digital projection. The resulting image is subject to the color rendition of the device. Each device has a different rendition. The image is never exactly what the photographer intended, nor is it a new object.

For the photographer who wants to make a final piece of art that is exactly what he wants it to be, the print is the only answer. The print is a new object, and, when made by the photographer, is exactly what was intended.

The introduction of Photoshop led to the creation of impossible referents: a cat standing on its tail, juggling mice and goldfish while balancing a snake on its nose, for instance. Manipulation of the image, although entertaining, has destroyed a lot of the credibility of photographs as records of actual events, which is the great strength of photography.

There is also a style at present among insensitive photographers to tweak the color of their work to make it spectacular, straining the credulity of viewers, and weakening photography’s strongest value, the accurate representation of reality.

With some digital cameras, the photographer can have the choice of the color renditions of films, with their characteristic highlight and shadow compression of values. These characteristics are a fault in imaging. Great photographers have always invented methods of overcoming this fault in film imaging. Digital imaging has never had this fault. Digital imaging at its best is vastly superior to film imaging. It baffles me that someone would want to step backward.

Before digital photography, the process demanded more dedication on the part of the photographer. With digital, the technical quality is so good that anyone can make images of excellent technical quality. However, the art of photography is as difficult as it ever was, and artistic photography is just as rare as it ever has been. Digital photography has meant the creation of astronomical numbers of bad photographs, and more picture takers than ever are getting lost in the subject or the image.

ON PHOTOGRAPHY part 3

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed. – Ansel Adams

;How do you know if a work of art means something to you? When an image sticks in your memory. When you can’t forget an image, that image means something to you. You don’t have to know why it means something to you. That image speaks to you, and that’s enough. It doesn’t matter if no one else sees it your way.

Black & white photographs have a classical or universal feeling, and their abstract qualities are quite apparent, since we don’t see in monochrome. They encourage abstract thinking.

Although the referent is important in my photographs, and its visual pleasure is the stimulus to pick up the camera, for me the photograph is more important than its referent. The photograph is essentially about what pleases my eye. I want to make beautiful sheets of paper.

The photograph, however, is more than the sheet of paper. The photograph is based on actuality, but exists independently, and it is what it is.

I’ve looked at millions of original photographs by great photographers, and original paintings by the masters in the great museums of the world. To see art in a book, or worse, on t´he internet, is not seeing the art. In a book, you see a picture of art. On the internet, you see a poor picture of a picture of the art. With any art, one must see the artists’ original to understand the value and richness of the artist’s vision. The work exhibited here is the original art.

From the beginning, my goal in making prints has been to make prints that thrill me. It’s never been enough to just have a picture turn out. I want the print to knock me out! The prints that knock me out with their presence are the ones I see as special. My gift is to know when they are special.

My goal in photography is to transform my vision into emotional experiences; to recognize my own visual pleasure, to capture the stimulating image, and to make the pleasure live again in the print. What sets good pictures apart is the photographers’ character and strength of vision presented in the form, structure and subject of the image.

There is something similar in all my images, a similarity between one image and another. It’s what I call my “style”. It’s a statement of myself in the expression in the work. I don’t try to show it. I can’t describe it. It’s just there, it’s positive, and it has become stronger over the years. Seeing the works together, the images seem very quiet and strong.

You may see one or two of my images in homes or galleries, and not make this connection. Here, where there are many images, you have the opportunity to see this connection. Look at all the images, see what is common to all of them. That is my style, my message, my vision, my conception.

Looking back over the sixty years of images since my first photograph, I see that I’ve consistently worked to strengthen my expression in the work.