Written by: Susanne Lomatch
Those of us driven to black & white photography as a medium and fine art form can usually point to established practitioners and a specific set of their creations as progenitors of our own creative process. Ansel Adams and John Garrett are two pioneers that roused my curiosities and motivated me to pursue this most abstract photography form. Though I can cite a few known works that had the greatest impact on me, I had never attempted (until now) to understand what either artist was thinking when he created them. In this article I briefly discuss those inspirational pieces and the artist’s story behind them, as is available in the published literature.
I start with Adams’ “Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake (c1947).” This image perhaps made the greatest impression on me of all Adams’ works. Sharp contrast makes a bold statement. Though the sky is quite dark, it has an almost unnatural tonal range compared to the landscape, creating an effect of the mountain and sky hovering over the dark outline of a lake. From Adams’ description [1], the photo was shot at 1:30AM in July; at midnight there is always light – “a calm dusk of silence and wilderness.” Adams shot the scene near sunrise, just as the peak turned pink. He debated using a red #25A filter, but settled on a deep yellow #15 instead, which adequately suppressed the shadowed foreground to highlight the mountain and sky. He shot a total of three 8x10 images on Isopan 64 before clouds enveloped the mountain at 2AM. Later, while traveling in Glacier, he lost two of the three image negatives from the water damage sustained when his film case dropped into the water during a float plane egress. On his recollection of the Alaska trip, he noted that he preferred the original Indian name Denali, commenting “it [is] a chauvinistic character of our nation to attach political names, quite often insignificant in history, to the glorious features of the land.” At the time, Native American designations were a minority on maps. Adams was equally critical of Alaskan mosquitoes, which had gotten trapped in his camera bellows in such numbers that a few got stuck on the film – and appeared as “silhouettes of airplanes in the skies of some negatives!”
“Monolith: The Face of Half Dome (c1927)” is an early predecessor to Adams’ more polished and famous Yosemite works, “Clearing Winter Storm (c1940)” and “Moon and Half Dome (c1960).” All three have compelling narratives from Adams’ point of view, and form a progression of his creative process. “Monolith” is raw and evocative, and if I had to choose, my favorite of the three. It is the first photograph in which Adams successfully utilized a deep red #29 Wratten filter to blacken a bland sky and push the contrast limits, taking advantage of a recent snowstorm and afternoon sun-induced shadows. Adams reminisces about the 2500 ft. steep climb he made that day with his fiancée and friends. He shot a total of twelve Wratten Panchromatic glass plates during the climb, and was left with two when he turned to face the Half Dome at a famous high ledge. Not satisfied with his first exposure, Adams prepared for his final. “I realized that the image would not carry the qualities I was aware of when I made the exposure…the majesty would not be properly conveyed using a K2 [#8 yellow] filter…I saw the photograph as a brooding form, with deep shadows and a distant sharp white peak against a dark sky [1].” Waiting until mid-afternoon when the sun and shadows posed an optimal balance, Adams shot the final with the #29 as a 5sec exposure at f/22. “This photograph represents my first conscious visualization; in my mind’s eye I saw the final image as made with the red filter. I was fortunate that I had that twelfth plate left…this was one of the most exciting moments of my photographic career [1].”
Of some debate is Adams’ meaning in his “photographic visualization” hypothesis. From his writings, it appears that he focused foremost on composition, with everything else (including whether the shot was taken ‘perfectly’) secondary. Of “Clearing Winter Storm” Adams remarked, “a certain amount of dodging and burning was required to achieve the tonal balance demanded of my visualization…I think of a negative as the ‘score’ and the print as a ‘performance’ of that score, which conveys the emotional and aesthetic ideas of the photographer at the time of making the exposure…there is no such thing as the ideal or perfect negative [1].” Adams goes on to say of this (IMHO technically perfect print) composition, “Although this photograph is often seen as an environmental statement, I do not recall that I ever intentionally made a photograph for environmentally significant purposes…my photographs that are considered to relate to these issues are images conceived for their intrinsic aesthetic and emotional qualities, whatever these may be [1].” Was Adams an artist first, and a photographer and environmentalist second and third? His own words indicate so.
“Rock and Surf (c1951)” is another striking composition that I could perhaps stare or glance at for hours. Clearly it falls within Adams’ own description as aesthetic or emotional, as he chose to highlight it in his portfolio even though it would surely garner much technical criticism from photography perfectionists for its less-than-perfect shadow content in the rock shadows. However, there are many valid artistic interpretations; the lack of shadow content conveys a mysterious and dramatic sensation. Intriguingly, Adams’ remarks for this photograph include: “I am well aware of a compelling impulse of photographers to discuss, with collector’s dedication, the equipment and materials they and their colleagues use, down to the smallest detail. I have never known painters to debate with such intensity the kind of canvas, paper, brushes, and paints used in their creative work. With photographers, however, such knowledge is traded in a kind of inner language of arcane significance…I find myself wondering at times just how Edward Weston made some of his photographs (he talked little of means and methods – it was mostly empirical magic to him) [1].”
John Garrett is a distinctly different black & white photographer compared to Adams. His career started as a fashion/beauty/advertising photographer in the ‘Swinging Sixties,’ and he morphed into a newsprint photographer (“reportage” as he calls it) in the 70s. As such, the films and techniques he uses are vastly dissimilar to those of Adams: grainy, contrasty, fast films with compositions that focus on dark moody shadows and deep contrasts, and in many cases, action. I first found Garrett’s compelling work from library books, which I subsequently purchased [2,3].
While I highly admire Garrett’s live action, portrait and fashion work, I found incredible value in the transference of his photography techniques for those subjects to architecture and landscape. My favorite is a shot he took of England’s Lake District, using Kodak High-Speed Infrared film and a #25 red filter [refs. 2,3; pages 29, 8]. The deep grain and red filter create a highly exaggerated image, offering a glimpse of an eerie-but-magical lake through the jet-black outline of sky and foreground landscape. As Garrett points out, simply shooting a fast, grainy film such as TMax 3200 with a red filter and a soft focus can reproduce this imagery. I have found these effects also achievable with a lower rated film and push processing, such as Ilford HP5+ shot and processed at 640 or 1250 ASA (or even higher for more grain). In fact, I learned about these fast, grainy films and push processing from Garrett. Over development sometimes makes a bold statement! In my own application of Garrett’s techniques, I have emphasized the effect of making the imagery look like a charcoal or pencil drawing, utilizing the additional technique of tone reversal (solarization). Garrett didn’t use solarization, but I stumbled on the technique in my processing for certain images that might never see the light of day without it.
In the digital era, these grainy, contrasty techniques can be reproduced by shooting at a very high digital speed, say 3200 ASA, and using desaturation and color channel blending techniques in Photoshop to render a final print. Grain can also be added using Photoshop algorithms, though I must admit the intrinsic noise in photographic film is still my favorite.
Garrett talks about his influences and his philosophies on B&W photography: “I grew up with black-and-white images all around me…the newspapers, magazines, movies and newsreels produced powerful black and white pictures that are indelibly printed on my memory…I have no interest in photographic technique for its own sake…technique is only the method to bring my visualization onto paper…Henri Carter-Bresson, Edward Weston, and Richard Avedon were great masters, but you are bowled over not by technical excellence, but by images [2].”
References:
[1] “Examples – The Making of 40 Photographs,” Ansel Adams, Little, Brown and Co., 1983. I didn’t read this book until very recently; it is a valuable and enlightening resource. It includes details on photographs from Adams’ pedagogical series, Camera-Negative-Print, interspersed with additional commentary and stories.
[2] “John Garrett’s Black-and-White Photography Master Class,” John Garrett, Amphoto Books, 2000.
[3] “The Art of Black and White Photography,” John Garrett, Sterling Publishing Co., 2003. (Original publication 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group.)
Susanne Lomatch
Whitehawk Art
Author of “Artists Need to Discover Camaraderie”
IPW Member
