Final Process Book by Grayson Brucato

Exploring the Art of Photography A Process Book

Grayson Brucato The Leading Grid Project University of Kansas

Step 1

Initial Research

years before me or just after in the USA, England, Germany, emerging in the late 70s and early 80s as important artist photographers. I encountered the work of Man Ray and Andy Warhol, and they were the biggest influences on my work. They are very different, but they work with the idea, the concept of the representation of the contemporary, in a different way, with a different quality, at a different time – which is very interesting and important to me. From the beginning I decided that it was very important to do it in color, because color at this time was something for advertising and industrial representation. Everybody said that color photography was not art. SH: Color was very modern, very contemporary, it spoke of the nowness of the world you wanted to capture and has of course become accepted just as the snapshot has become recognized as a form for artists to use. Your work seems to exist between the snapshot and more formal work. OB: The snapshot is very important to me. The first and biggest influence was Henri Cartier- Bresson. William Eggleston was the first photographer to exhibit in a museum with color photography, and his work shows Cartier-Bresson’s influence. I saw a huge retrospective of Cartier-Bresson from which I understood that he had been everywhere, in a time when it was very difficult to travel. He was doing everything: landscape, portrait... he had not time to think exhaustively about what he was doing. I was very interested in the movies and the use of the night in a story, there was nothing like that in photography. So the beginning for me was to be between Cartier-Bresson and a movie... I decided night photography and color photography was my field. SH: Photographs of urban spaces? OB: Yes, city spaces. The first series starts in the European countryside and then moves to city spaces in Paris and Milan like a story. The second series “Artificial Illumination” is a little bit of a confrontation between east and west. There is Hong Kong, Tokyo, Florence, Rome, Paris... so it was also a way to understand the difference between a different kind of life. I was interested in the intimate. SH: In your current work, there is a particular attention to the use of focus, specifically the use of a very localized field of sharpness, surrounded by a larger blurred area. OB: I was in Tokyo with a friend, an architect and teacher, and we were having a discussion about the contemplative blur of a landscape painted by Gerhard Richter. I said it wasn’t natural, it wasn’t normal, no one sees in this way. My friend wore glasses that he took off and said, “I can assure you that someone does see in that way”. I have a strong reflection of this time and I think, “Yes, this is ok, and true, and perhaps it is interesting to find a view in the middle”. The possibility to see blur and focus at the same time, for me it was a way to have a confrontation between realism and the abstraction. Photography is too descriptive: the land-

OLIVO BARBIERI

scape with the tree and each single leaf, this was boring for me because the camera makes too many decisions. So I decided I wanted to show what was important in the frame. My first work was for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1999, and they asked me to make a project on Italy. I decided that two things were very important, the San Nicola Stadium in Bari by Renzo Piano and the big trial for mafia corruption. So I started this research, the first was in the stadium and I remember that it was very difficult. I remember thinking, “Now I am here but what can I see? What can I discover that we don’t see every day, every week, through the television?”. I started to work with this idea of soft focus using a tilt-shift lens, and I discovered that not only could I decide what was the important part of an image, but also everything changed. Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered. So I started to do that in several different places in the east and west. It was a very strong discovery, and a very simple one. The camera obscura of Leonardo da Vinci and Canaletto works in the same way. It is a very old device. SH: So the work shifted from being narrative-led to one defined by, or at least emerging from, a politicized agenda? Making the world appear as a model, making structures and systems that exist within cities visible, creating comparisons, asking questions? OB: For me it was very interesting. There are two situations with this kind of work, that for me are very important. There are many artists who make models and take pictures, in a way that they look like reality. I was much more interested in the contrary, to do a picture of reality that looks like a model. So you have the political possibility to look at it and decide if it is good or not, if you like it or not, if it is good or dangerous. To see something for the first time, it is very, very important, and a very strong possibility for art. At a time where everything is on television, in newspapers, on the Internet... SH: With Rome you show not only the Roman, the classical and the contemporary, but also the ugliness of our disposable culture that you make appear very beautiful. The piles of discarded cars, things on the periphery of the city that we simply wouldn’t know about, or we glimpse from the window of the bus on the way to the airport. Looking at the range of images within each series of photographs, there is balance between what is known, how it is held within the city, and the unknown and how that exists. With the films we are looking for the things that we know, self affirmation through recognition, waiting for the next place to appear. In the Rome film, you use the noise of the helicopter to break this cycle, as the illusion of the model is broken, especially when its shadow is seen on the square below. OB: It was also the shift caused by 9/11, someone flying over the city is a potential danger, and you feel that power. The sound of the helicopter brings this to the fore. It is important to feel this. There are also the areas that are sensitive, such as train stations for example; in Las Vegas it is the desert area where the atom

bomb tests were made. Some think that if they have control of the air, they have control of everything. SH: Technology has taught us to view things in certain ways. What is interesting is that these are not conventional aerial photographs, they are not satellite shots (the Google understanding of the world or perhaps Pentagon ones). OB: It is a way to understand these landscapes and cityscapes. Appearing as a model allows curiosity. Las Vegas is very much like Rome, a theme park of the history of architecture from the pyramid to the Eiffel Tower. It was a big challenge for me because it already looks like a huge model, all these constructions sometimes clumsy, like a cake, so its reality is already questioned. Surrounded by desert, all its energy and water brought from outside, it is very surreal, like a model on a table. A city such a Shanghai exists because of the river, but Las Vegas is completely artificial. Neither of them existed 100-150 years ago – they represent two different developments of a similar age. SH: You first visited Shanghai in 1989, and there was only one skyscraper. When you returned last year to make this film the development was remarkable. But you chose to look at the periphery of the city rather than the center. OB: It is interesting to understand how the river is important for the existence of the city, so the film starts from one bridge and ends with another, creating a circularity. I asked where the 11 million population of Shanghai lived, as it wasn’t possible that they lived in the city. The helicopter made it possible to see what lay around the center of this city. There is a sprawl of identical houses that looks fake, because there are so many of them. It is huge, the opposite of Las Vegas where everything is within. The city is so much like a model that it was not necessary to use the lens. Rome and Las Vegas are so known, this was like the depths of the Amazon forest. It is like a biological experiment, growing and growing. It was much more important to show the model like this rather than a model of a model. Filmed in winter, the light was harsher, the colors flatter, unlike the bright spring light in the other two films, there were no shadows. The film is also for the most part silent. At the start there is the sound of the helicopter which links it to the other films. The film has a subtitle “A Silent Story,” because there is no sound and also because there is a double silence. The silence of China that has done all of this without speaking to the world, building the city and the silence of the west which doesn’t admit that something so big is going on. There is a passage from a counter revolutionary song The East is Red that appears in the film Dongfang Hong (Wang Ping, 1965) – “The east is red, the sun is rising. China has brought forth a Mao Zedong”. The first image of the film is of one of the few remaining statues of Mao. SH: You have chosen to present your films as if in a cinema, as film, rather than a video installation.

OB: The title of the project is site specific_. Really there is nothing site specific except the cities themselves, so there is a bit of a joke there, and it plays with the ideas of the site specific within art. Las Vegas and Rome were shot on 35mm film and Shanghai on High Definition Video, so they are very much film, although I think of them as works for galleries and museums. I added the titles and credits to make a fake real film. SH: You have said that you do not want to be a super tourist, the cities you film or photograph are specifically chosen by you. OB: The three places I have made films, are very different places, very different cities. It was very interesting to have Rome – Europe, Las Vegas – North America, Shanghai – the east; the three places reinvent the concept of a city. SH: The six images chosen to complete the show have a strong sense of the place they depict but are not explicitly of that place. They relate to one another, but they also stand alone, as can the films. You seem to want to show us the world we know in a new and fresh way, from which we can learn and discern things, to shift our desire to see the famous or celebrated. OB: It is a confrontation of all the concepts and ideas that we have, from the media, from the culture and iconography of the world. It corresponds to something real and if there is something else, it is in between. It can be a famous building seen in a different way, or to discover something that is very close to an important place that you do not know, or something very similar in places far apart. There is high and low culture, although I don’t agree with this division, so I’m curious to question it. Things are more confused. SH: We understand things differently from culture to culture, or at least have some sense of the constant shifts between them. It’s that shift that allows a person to look in a detached way at things,

Since 2004, Olivo Barbieri has been developing a series of large-scale aerial photographs on major sites in Rome, Las Vegas, Shanghai, Montreal, Los Angeles, Amman, Florence, Milan, and New York. Utilizing a large format camera with a tilt and shift lens, Barbieri deftly renders the grand scale of these major metropolises to mere models of themselves. His bird’s eye perspectives on some of mankind’s greatest architectural achievements, such as the Colosseum seen here, have a mesmerizing quality, simultaneously evocative of our infinitesimal size as individuals yet illuminating of the majesty of our civilization’s progress as a whole.

to make assessments and judgments. OB: It is also the shape. The shape is what we know, what we see and what we can understand, but it is only a shape. Maybe the real thing to understand is how the shape corresponds, the iconography corresponds, to something real not because it is real for the understanding. Why, on what, and how many – the quantity is important, to understand the bigness of something – because to change the point of view is to change the perception. Maybe my work is not about iconography or representation, before everything was about perception. The way we perceive something is very important, because after we see it we try and understand it, but without a careful perception it is too easy to see what is normal.

Olivo Barbieri Work Descriptors Natural Modern Clear Cluttered Blurred Surreal Beautiful Interesting Cityscape Vibrant Candid Appealing Eye-Catching Idealistic Perfect Large Travel Monumental Fun Energetic Happy Dull Perspective Buildings People

Colorful Toy Staged High Though-Out Detailed Jealousy Exploration Global Sleek Simple Reflective Meaningful Crowded Models Architecture Birds-Eye Flying Contrast Cropped Chaos Busy Depth Unbelievable Rustic

Natural- existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind Vibrant- full of energy and enthusiasm Idealized- regard or represent as perfect or better than in reality

Chaos- complete disorder and confusion Detailed- having many details or facts; showing attention to detail Energetic- showing or involving great activity or vitality

Olivo Barbieri

Carpi, Italy

Idealized Disarray

Pecha Kucha

Idealized Disarray

Adams, Ansel (Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984), photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of 1907, and Adams’s father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to recoup. An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty. His relatively elderly parents, affluent family history, and the live-in presence of his mother’s maiden sister and aged father all combined to create an environment that was decidedly Victorian and both socially and emotionally conservative. Adams’s mother spent much of her time brooding and fretting over her husband’s inability to restore the Adams fortune, leaving an ambivalent imprint on her son. Charles Adams, on the other hand, deeply and patiently influenced, encouraged, and supported his son. Natural shyness and a certain intensity of genius, coupled with the dramatically “earthquaked” nose, caused Adams to have problems fitting in at school. In later life he noted that he might have been diagnosed as hyperactive. There is also the distinct possibility that he may have suffered from dyslexia. He was not successful in the various schools to which his parents sent him; consequently, his father and aunt tutored him at home. Ultimately, he managed to earn what he termed a “legitimizing diploma” from the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School — perhaps equivalent to having completed the eighth grade. The most important result of Adams’s somewhat solitary and unmistakably different childhood was the joy that he found in na-

ture, as evidenced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden Gate. Nearly every day found him hiking the dunes or meandering along Lobos Creek, down to Baker Beach, or out to the very edge of the American continent. When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Soon he was taking lessons, and the ardent pursuit of music became his substitute for formal schooling. For the next dozen years the piano was Adams’s primary occupation and, by 1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography. If Adams’s love of nature was nurtured in the Golden Gate, his life was, in his words, “colored and modulated by the great earth gesture” of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as “keeper” of the club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge. He became friends with many of the club’s leaders, who were founders of America’s nascent conservation movement. He met his wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The couple had two children. Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. Weston and Strand frequently

ANSEL ADAMS

consulted him for technical advice. He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns. Adams developed the famous and highly complex “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization. He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject. Adams’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal. He often labored for eighteen or more hours per day, for days and weeks on end. There were no vacations, no holidays, no Sundays in Ansel Adams’s life. Frequently, after and intense period of work, he would return to San Francisco or Yosemite, promptly contract the “flu,” and spend several days in bed. His hyper-kinetic existence was also fueled by alcohol, for which he had a particular fondness, and a constant whirl of social activity, friends, and colleagues. As Beaumont Newhall writes in his FOCUS: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (1993), “Ansel was a great party man and loved to entertain. He had a very dominating personality, and would always be the center of attention” (p. 235). Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. However, his great influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His black-andwhite images were not “realistic” documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing. For Adams, the environmental issues of particular importance were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness. He focused on what he termed the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted the Park Service’s “resortism,” which had led to the over development of the national parks and their domination by private concessionaires. But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions and sea otters, and for clean air and water. An advocate of balanced, restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental mendacity and shortsightedness. Yet he invariably treated his opponents with respect and courtesy. Though wilderness and the environment were his grand passions,

photography was his calling, his metier, his raison d’etre. Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental purposes. On 12 April 1977 he wrote to his publisher, Tim Hill, “I know I shall be castigated by a large group of people today, but I was trained to assume that art related to the elusive quality of beauty and that the purpose of art was concerned with the elevation of the spirit (horrible Victorian notion!!)” Adams was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of “humanity” in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that “the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees” (quoted by Adams, Oral History, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, p. 498). Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists. On the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been preserved for all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues. Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography. Adams always claimed he was not “influenced,” but, consciously or unconsciously, he was firmly in the tradition of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Carlton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge. And he was the direct philosophical heir of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. He grew up in a time and place where his zeitgeist was formed by the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and “muscular” Americanism, by the pervading sense of manifest destiny, and the notion that European civilization was being reinvented — much for the better — in the new nation and, particularly, in the new West. Adams died in Monterey, California. Adams’s subject matter, the magnificent natural beauty of the West, was absolutely, unmistakably American, and his chosen instrument, the camera, was a quintessential artifact of the twentieth-century culture. He was blessed with an unusually generous, charismatic personality, and his great faith in people and human nature was amply rewarded. Adams channeled his energies in ways that served his fellow citizens, personified in his lifelong effort to preserve the American wilderness. Above all, Adams’s philosophy and optimism struck a chord in the national phsyche. More than any other influential American of his epoch, Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment.

On Photography Susan Sontag Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads - as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set

on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality - photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid - and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph - any photograph - seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration

photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film - the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity - and ubiquity - of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization

of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption - the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed - seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Editorials Herb Lubalin

Herb Lubalin, a well-known American graphic designer, is famous for his work in poster design, magazine design, packaging solutions, and even typeface creation in his typeface ITC Avant Garde. He was born in New York in 1918, where he stayed for the majority of his career, and throughout his life, his love for typography and graphic design propelled him to have an extremely successful career. During the beginnings of his career, he spent time working at different design and advertising firms, before opening his own design firm, Herb Lubalin, Inc. in 1964. Out of all of the amazing works he did during this time, he is probably most well-known for his work with Ralph Ginzburg in designing his magazines titled Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde. Following his death in 1981, it is clear that Lubalinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work was not only appealing and successful in communicating the information it needed to, but also extremely influential in helping to progress typography and design as a whole to where it is today. In fact, we still use and see examples of his work each and every day.

Esquire Magazine

Esquire Magazine was founded in 1933, originally intended to be a men’s apparel publication. According to Hearst’s website, “Esquire defines, reflects and celebrates what it means to be a man in contemporary American culture”. However, as time progressed and social issues and focuses shifted, Esquire began to widen the range of the information that they covered to make it what it is today, which includes talking about politics, health, fashion, arts, and literature. It has gradually become one of the most well-known publications in America, often being recognized as a top magazine in the nation, and has also proven to be extremely influential in the way it integrates and organizes type and images seamlessly and successfully. It has won multiple prestigious awards over the course of its life, and will most likely continue to win more. Additionally, Esquire has begun to expand its production around the world, now including 27 editions around the globe on top of its US publication. Without a doubt, Esquire Magazine will continue to create informative and appealing editions as time passes, and will hopefully continue to have the same prominent influence and effect on society that it does now.

Alexey Brodovitch

Alexey Brodovitch, a Russian graphic designer, is most famous for his role as director of Harper’s Bazaar Magazine. Born in Russia in 1898, Brodovitch served as an extremely well-known and progressive figure for many places around the world. Specific to us, he brought the radically simplified style that we see as “modern” design to the US from his time in Europe, which is still very popular in society today. In terms of the magazine, Brodovitch also became a role model for aspiring art directors everywhere through his unique and exploratory design work. Within Harper’s Bazaar, Brodovitch liked to play with the form of a block of text, and have it mimic the shape and movement of the image it was accompanied by. Between his personal work, teaching career, and professional career, Brodovitch is seen today as a very influential designer, and even received some awards to recognize his work. However, behind the scenes, he did not have the best home life, riddled with loss of family and natural disasters. But, many people think this tragic lifestyle is what propelled Brodovitch to create the challenging works that he did, which helped push the boundaries of graphic design. Brodovitch eventually died in France in 1971.

Jonathan Hoefler

Born in America in 1970, Jonathan Hoefler was a well-known typeface designer and founder of the Hoefler Type Foundry in 1989 at the age of 19. Throughout his life, Hoefler would go on to work with many different famous designers, including Tobias Frere-Jones, which helped to shape his personal style. This style would be reflected in his work, which came in the form of designing original typefaces for well well-known magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Esquire, The New York Times, Rolling Stones, and Harperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bazaar, to name a few. Additionally, Hoefler is most known for designing the Hoefler Text family of typefaces, which can be seen as a part of Appleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s operating system. As a result of all of these world famous designs, it is clear that Hoefler was a challenging, progressive, and influential designer who will continue to create more of his amazing work as time passes.

Gail Anderson

Born in 1962, Gail Anderson is an American graphic designer who is most well-known for her role as the senior art director for Rolling Stone Magazine. She also became a writer and educator over the course of her career, publishing multiple graphic design books with other famous artists. In her time at the School of Visual Arts, she was taught by Paula Scher, which undoubtedly influenced her style and made her want to teach people later in life, who helped Anderson receive a BFA in 1984. Between her work with books, magazines, and even a bit in typefaces, Anderson slowly became a role model for both men and women, especially, in the design world, and has clearly had a very successful life and career thus far. To recognize these successes, she was also the recipient of a 2008 AIGA medal.

David Carson

David Carson, American-born graphic designer and art director, was best known for his uncommon style that challenged artistic and societal norms. Often, people say that he permanently changed how people viewed graphic design through his work in the 90s. As director of Ray Gun Magazine, people began to see him as, according to Famous Graphic Designer’s website, “the godfather of ‘grunge typography ‘“. Between his work at Ray Gun, his other professional gigs, and his personal work, Carson began to develop his unique style, which is often referred to as bold and radical. Although not exemplifying what people viewed as “good graphic design” at the time, Carson has undoubtedly changed the standards of design and continues to be seen as a very progressive and successful artist.

Tibor Kalman (M&Co)

Tibor Kalman, a world renowned Hungarian-American graphic designer, created many amazingly appealing and successful works that have influenced artists and designers for years. As founder of M&Co, along with Carol Bokuniewicz and Liz Trovato, Kalman really began to make a name for himself. M&Co was a design firm that produced work for many different clients through many different solutions, and really allow Kalman to take creative control. Unfortunately, Kalman was forced to shut the company down in 1993, prompting him to work exclusively on magazine design in the following years. Kalman worked with Interview Magazine and then Colors Magazine, where he became founding editorin-chief as a result of his wide range of skills and knowledge. Eventually, Kalman was able to reopen M&Co in 1997 before passing away in 1999. However, received an AIGA medal that same year, and the influence of M&Coâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and Kalmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s designs continue to influence artists and designers everywhere today.

Neville Brody

As an English graphic designer, Neville Brody has become one of the most well-known graphic designers, typographers, and art directors of modern society. In working with many different magazines, music artists, and newspapers, he was able to develop a wide range of skills that have made his so successful today. While in school, he was often told that his work would never make it in the commercial world, and often pushed the boundaries of comfort and appeal in design. However, it was this uniqueness that propelled his career to the next level. He continued to create challenging and exploratory work with magazines, music artists, and newspapers for the early parts of his career, which Famous Graphic Designer’s website says, “gave new meaning to visual language”. This led him to create Research Studios in London in 1994, which served as his own design studio where he continued to make amazing and influential works that we still see and study today. Additionally, he is one of the founding members of three different typographic organizations (Font Works, The FontShop, and FontFont), all of which have reflected yet also progressed his work with both type and more broadly graphic design.

Font Exploration Idealized Disarray

Idealized Disarray

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

What are the advantages of a multiple column grid? It allows designers to align type and images in an organized and appealing way while still giving them the freedom to place things all around the page How many characters/words is optimal for a line length? Between 50-60 characters per line, between 9-12 words per line Why is the baseline grid used in design? To perfectly align your text to a vertical grid (similar to writing on lined paper), creating a visually appealing organizational pattern What are reasons to set type justified/unjustified? Justified type creates nice geometric shapes that could create a successful organization if used correctly, while unjustified type creates more organic forms What is a typographic river? Gaps in typesetting, which appear to run through a paragraph of text, due to a coincidental alignment of spaces What do clothesline, hangline or flow line mean? A line used on each page that restricts type from going above it What does type color/texture mean? Type color/texture is how dense or heavy text appears on the page How does x-height affect type color? The higher the x-height, the denser the type color What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph (are there any rules)? Indent the first line of the new paragraph, bold the first word o the new paragraph, use a drop cap, or provide a one-line gap between the last sentence of the preceding paragraph and the first sentence of the new paragraph

Question Responses

Font Studies Arial Black, Marion

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati

Article Title THIS IS A SUBHEAD

Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent architi rem sequi vel ea vendem explabo.

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT:

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facil-

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

la pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat. Ur alibusam qui illuptas apisse liquibus autemquias vollabo repudipsam, te quid moditatia sequund itatquidus que porem et qui doluptatatem sit quia digent atus am faceatem am, od eossundamus unt rem non et porem es des quamenderem quibusdam ent offic te volut etur, tetures rem ratemo enduciis eossim volupta tiunt.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur? Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti. In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta voluptatur? Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci Sus doloreptur?

Avenir Heavy Oblique, Athelas

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Article Title THIS IS A SUBHEAD

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic

totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent architi rem sequi vel ea vendem explabo.

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat. Ur alibusam qui illuptas apisse liquibus autemquias vollabo repudipsam, te quid moditatia sequund itatquidus que porem et qui doluptatatem sit quia digent atus am faceatem am, od eossundamus unt rem non et porem es des quamenderem quibusdam ent offic te volut etur, tetures rem ratemo enduciis eossim volupta tiunt.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui core-

rum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur? Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti. In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta voluptatur? Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci Sus doloreptur?

Myriad Pro Bold, Georgia

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Article Title THIS IS A SUBHEAD

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat qua-

tum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur? Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti. In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta voluptatur? Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto

Marion Italic, Arial

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Article Title

THIS IS A SUBHEAD INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent architi

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat. Ur alibusam qui illuptas apisse liquibus autemquias vollabo repudipsam, te quid moditatia sequund itatquidus que porem et qui doluptatatem sit quia digent atus am faceatem am, od eossundamus unt rem non et porem es des quamenderem quibusdam ent offic te volut etur, tetures rem ratemo enduciis eossim volupta tiunt.

Sathu, Minion Pro

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Article Title THIS IS A SUBHEAD INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent architi rem sequi vel ea vendem explabo.

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

PT Sans Caption Bold, Palatino

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Article Title THIS IS A SUBHEAD

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT:

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui

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Inspiration

In looking at various examples of good magazine covers, such as the ones featured above, I was able to combine my own personal style with some of the aspects I saw to create 10 different possible magazine covers for this project. Specifically, these covers showed me that in terms of hierarchy, the picture should obviously be the largest graphic element on the page, followed by the magazine title and main focus of the magazine. Each of the magazines that inspired me used color and typography very successfully to make the covers extremely visually appealing, which I tried to use in my personal covers. They are all interesting to look at, and they make known all of the necessary information in a fun and organized way.

In-Class Exercise

Step 2

Exploratory Layouts

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The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

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The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

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The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

Barbieri achieves this effect with the help of a helicopter, which allows him to hover like a bird over each city. From this vantage, he chooses a single building, monument, or other distinctive urban feature, upon which he selectively focuses, leaving the rest of its surroundings blurred. This effectively throws off perspective and largely eliminates a sense of depth, making these otherwise unaltered photographs look entirely unreal. This is just as the artist would have it. As he has claimed: “I’ve never been interested in photography, but rather images. I believe my work begins where photography ends.” He achieves this effect with the help of a helicopter, which allows him to hover like a bird over each city. From this vantage, he chooses a single building, monument, or other distinctive urban feature, upon which he selectively focuses, leaving the rest of its surroundings blurred. This effectively throws off perspective and largely eliminates a sense of depth, making these otherwise unaltered photographs look entirely unreal. This is just as the artist would have it. As he claims: “I’ve never been interested in photography, but rather images. I believe my work begins where photography ends.” ~ Karen Kedmey

TTL The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens

Idealized Di By Olivo Barbieri

Photography

isarray Since the late 1970s, Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri has been producing pictures that confound perception; some of these images he manipulates, others only appear to have been altered. Perception, in fact, is a driving force for the artist, who has been seeking to deconstruct and question how we see since he first pointed his camera out at the world, and took a shot. Through November 15, a retrospective at Rome’s Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo (MAXXI) takes a long look at Barbieri’s prolific career and traces the development of his imagery since 1978. It is eye-opening to compare his earliest works with his most recent ones and to realize that his vision has remained remarkably consistent. As his photographs from the early ’80s attest, Barbieri has always had an exquisite and mischievous sense of the power of the camera’s frame and the effects of light on film. With his deft cropping and focusing, he makes the ordinary seem strange. Among his best known series, one in which he makes the real look fake, is “Site Specific,” which he began in 2003. Consisting of photographs and related films, this epic project takes viewers on a romp around the world’s major cities, including New York, Rome, London, Tel Aviv, and Bangkok, all of which appear miniaturized, filled with dollhouse buildings and minuscule pedestrians.

TTL The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

TTL

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

THRU THE LENS

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

TTL The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

Since the late 1970s, Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri has been producing pictures that confound perception; some of these images he manipulates, others only appear to have been altered. Perception, in fact, is a driving force for the artist, who has been seeking to deconstruct and question how we see since he first pointed his camera out at the world, and took a shot. Through November 15, a retrospective at Rome’s Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo (MAXXI) takes a long look at Barbieri’s prolific career and traces the development of his imagery since 1978. It is eye-opening to compare his earliest works with his most recent ones and to realize that his vision has remained remarkably consistent. As his photographs from the early ’80s attest, Barbieri has always had an exquisite and mischievous sense of the power of the camera’s frame and the effects of light on film. With his deft cropping and focusing, he makes the ordinary seem strange. Among his best known series, one in which he makes the real look fake, is “Site Specific,” which he began in 2003. Consisting of photographs and related films, this epic project takes viewers on a romp around the world’s major cities, including New York, Rome, London, Tel Aviv, and Bangkok, all of which appear miniaturized, filled with dollhouse buildings and minuscule pedestrians. Barbieri achieves this effect with the help of a helicopter, which allows him to hover like a bird over each city. From this vantage, he chooses a single building, monument, or other distinctive urban feature, upon which he selectively focuses, leaving the rest of its surroundings blurred. This effectively throws off perspective and largely eliminates a sense of depth, making these otherwise unaltered photographs look entirely unreal. This is just as the artist would have it. As he has claimed: “I’ve never been interested in photography, but rather images. I believe my work begins where photography ends.” He achieves this effect with the help of a helicopter, which allows him to hover like a bird over each city. From this vantage, he chooses a single building, monument, or other distinctive urban feature, upon which he selectively focuses, leaving the rest of its surroundings blurred. This effectively throws off perspective and largely eliminates a sense of depth, making these otherwise unaltered photographs look entirely unreal. This is just as the artist would have it. As he claims: “I’ve never been interested in photography, but rather images. I believe my work begins where photography ends.” ~ Karen Kedmey

Thru The

Lens The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

Thru The Lens

By Olivo Barbieri

Idealized Disarray

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Thru The Lens

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

Thru The Lens

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

THRU THE LENS

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

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The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

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The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

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Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

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Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray By Olivo Barbieri

THRU THE LENS

Step 3

Initial Design Directions

Idealized D is a rr ay

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The Art of

Tilt-Shift Lens Photography An Introduction to the Work of Olivo Barbieri

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Idealized Dissaray An Interview with Olivo Barbieri

Since the end of the 19th century, as populations swelled and an urban existence was defined, the city has provided a significant subject for the modern artist. The concurrent development of the camera provided a means to create an objective accuracy, or a closeness to life, which recorded these new places – their streets, buildings, modes of transportation, people and their lives. This documentary tradition has remained an important part of photographic practice. Photography becomes a tool to create the abstract, and it offers the possibility to create fiction – through recording staged scenarios and capturing the ambiguity between objects and people. For over 20 years, Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri’s work has focused on cities and their inhabitants. Barbieri’s photographs and his more recent films seem to exist between documentary and fiction. At first glance, the scenes we see in Olivo Barbieri’s photographs and films seem to be of detailed models. They are, in fact, shot on 35mm film or HDV (High Definition Video) from a helicopter that moves across and around each city. Through the manipulation of focus, by playing with the viewer’s sense of scale and distance, Barbieri redefines the sense of urban space. The city and its edges are watched from above; specific locations, some of them on our tourist maps, are somehow made unreal. Separated from function and the everyday, they become unfamiliar; it is as if we are seeing them for the first time. In this way, the work is within a tradition of the photographic image, a sense of strangeness forcing us to think about the real and the unreal – how the ‘fact’ of an image can blur into a fiction and elude the notion of things being fixed. The films are also about organization and chaos. At times, the city appears as an organic singularity, every section or quarter playing a vital role in a complex interweaving of public and private, new and old. Suddenly its fragmentary nature reappears – a car wrecking lot borders on an ancient site – and a sense of the arbitrary creeps in. Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi (1982) established this sense of design and fracture, stretching and compressing the film medium in more complicated ways; time lapse was frequently used, bringing pattern and rhythm to the proceedings. Barbieri’s means are much more economic, his process simpler and therefore, the space opened up to the audience more dynamic. The viewer is aware of looking and hearing in a particular way, through a lens that enforces a distance and through the subtle use of sound, silence and speed. Stephen Hepworth How did you become interested in photography, how did you became a photographer? Olivo Barbieri When I was sixteen, I was at the sea – it was a beautiful day with beautiful light. I had a magazine, and what was in the magazine was not what was around me. So I thought why? And I decided that this is what I wanted to do. I was interested in what was around me – the world – but also the town, the periphery. For my generation, it was much easier to use photography like art than those before. There were many artist photographers, but very few decided to use photography like an art. They were interested in reportage or documentary...famous photographers like Eugène Atget and August Sander; it is difficult to say that they wanted to be artists – the first, perhaps were born two years before me or just after in the USA, England, Germany, emerging in the late 70s and early 80s as important artist photographers. I encountered the work of Man Ray and Andy Warhol, and they were the biggest influences on my work. They are very different, but they work with the idea, the concept of the representation of the contemporary, in a different way, with a different quality, at a different time – which is very interesting and important to me. From the beginning I decided that it was very important to do it in color, because color at this time was something for advertising and industrial representation. Everybody said that color photography was not art. SH Color was very modern, very contemporary, it spoke of the

nowness of the world you wanted to capture and has of course become accepted just as the snapshot has become recognized as a form for artists to use. Your work seems to exist between the snapshot and more formal work. OB The snapshot is very important to me. The first and biggest influence was Henri Cartier- Bresson. William Eggleston was the first photographer to exhibit in a museum with color photography, and his work shows Cartier-Bresson’s influence. I saw a huge retrospective of Cartier-Bresson from which I understood that he had been everywhere, in a time when it was very difficult to travel. He was doing everything: landscape, portrait... he had not time to think exhaustively about what he was doing. I was very interested in the movies and the use of the night in a story, there was nothing like that in photography. So the beginning for me was to be between Cartier-Bresson and a movie... I decided night photography and color photography was my field. SH Photographs of urban spaces? OB Yes, city spaces. The first series starts in the European countryside and then moves to city spaces in Paris and Milan like a story. The second series “Artificial Illumination” is a little bit of a confrontation between east and west. There is Hong Kong, Tokyo, Florence, Rome, Paris... so it was also a way to understand the difference between a different kind of life. I was interested in the intimate. SH In your current work, there is a particular attention to the use of focus, specifically the use of a very localized field of sharpness, surrounded by a larger blurred area. OB I was in Tokyo with a friend, an architect and teacher, and we were having a discussion about the contemplative blur of a landscape painted by Gerhard Richter. I said it wasn’t natural, it wasn’t normal, no one sees in this way. My friend wore glasses that he took off and said, “I can assure you that someone does see in that way”. I have a strong reflection of this time and I think, “Yes, this is ok, and true, and perhaps it is interesting to find a view in the middle”. The possibility to see blur and focus at the same time, for me it was a way to have a confrontation between realism and the abstraction. Photography is too descriptive: the landscape with the tree and each single leaf, this was boring for me because the camera makes too many decisions. So I decided I wanted to show what was important in the frame. My first work was for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1999, and they asked me to make a project on Italy. I decided that two things were very important, the San Nicola Stadium in Bari by Renzo Piano and the big trial for mafia corruption. So I started this research, the first was in the stadium and I remember that it was very difficult. I remember thinking, “Now I am here but what can I see? What can I discover that we don’t see every day, every week, through the television?”. I started to work with this idea of soft focus using a tilt-shift lens, and I discovered that not only could I decide what was the important part of an image, but also everything changed. Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered. So I started to do that in several different places in the east and west. It was a very strong discovery, and a very simple one. The camera obscura of Leonardo da Vinci and Canaletto works in the same way. It is a very old device. SH So the work shifted from being narrative-led to one defined by, or at least emerging from, a politicized agenda? Making the world appear as a model, making structures and systems that exist within cities visible, creating comparisons, asking questions? OB For me it was very interesting. There are two situations with this kind of work, that for me are very important. There are many artists who make models and take pictures, in a way that they look like reality. I was much more interested in the contrary, to do a picture of reality that looks like a model. So you have the political possibility to look at it and decide if it is good or not, if you like it or not, if it is good or dangerous. To see something for the first time, it is very, very important, and a very strong

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered.â&#x20AC;? - Olivo Barbieri

â&#x20AC;&#x153;It is a way to understand these landscapes and cityscapes. Appearing as a model allows curiosity.â&#x20AC;? - Olivo Barbieri

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possibility for art. At a time where everything is on television, in newspapers, on the Internet... SH These ideas are very apparent in the three films you have made, and are showing at Bloomberg SPACE. When I heard that you were filming Shanghai, I immediately thought of the idea of a trilogy of cities representing the old world, the new world, and the future world. But there is more to it than that, you obviously have a personal relationship to each of these cities and your own ideas as to what they represent. In the case of Rome, you have spoken about a city full of beautiful things, which people wish to come and see; yet it is highly congested as a result. OB Rome in terms of representation is a big problem, because it is a huge postcard. I was interested if it was possible to see it again! After experiencing several places in the east I returned with a better understanding of old Italian cities. I found a new balance I didn’t see before, because everything was so familiar. I decided to make a film of the city, to miniaturize it. I was curious to know what would happen when the focus of the camera moved from one subject to another. Everything looked very different. There was a double distance, one is the very obvious distance of the helicopter from the ground, and the other is the distance created by this kind of vision. SH With Rome you show not only the Roman, the classical and the contemporary, but also the ugliness of our disposable culture that you make appear very beautiful. The piles of discarded cars, things on the periphery of the city that we simply wouldn’t know about, or we glimpse from the window of the bus on the way to the airport. Looking at the range of images within each series of photographs, there is balance between what is known, how it is held within the city, and the unknown and how that exists. With the films we are looking for the things that we know, self affirmation through recognition, waiting for the next place to appear. In the Rome film, you use the noise of the helicopter to break this cycle, as the illusion of the model is broken, especially when its shadow is seen on the square below. OB It was also the shift caused by 9/11, someone flying over the city is a potential danger, and you feel that power. The sound of the helicopter brings this to the fore. It is important to feel this. There are also the areas that are sensitive, such as train stations for example; in Las Vegas it is the desert area where the atom bomb tests were made. Some think that if they have control of the air, they have control of everything. SH Technology has taught us to view things in certain ways. What is interesting is that these are not conventional aerial photographs, they are not satellite shots (the Google understanding of the world or perhaps Pentagon ones). OB It is a way to understand these landscapes and cityscapes. Appearing as a model allows curiosity. Las Vegas is very much like Rome, a theme park of the history of architecture from the pyramid to the Eiffel Tower. It was a big challenge for me because it already looks like a huge model, all these constructions sometimes clumsy, like a cake, so its reality is already questioned. Surrounded by desert, all its energy and water brought from outside, it is very surreal, like a model on a table. A city such a Shanghai exists because of the river, but Las Vegas is completely artificial. Neither of them existed 100-150 years ago – they represent two different developments of a similar age. SH You first visited Shanghai in 1989, and there was only one skyscraper. When you returned last year to make this film the development was remarkable. But you chose to look at the periphery of the city rather than the center. OB It is interesting to understand how the river is important for the existence of the city, so the film starts from one bridge and ends with another, creating a circularity. I asked where the 11 million population of Shanghai lived, as it wasn’t possible that they lived in the city. The helicopter made it possible to see what lay around the center of this city. There is a sprawl of identical houses that looks fake, because there are so many of them. It is huge, the opposite of Las Vegas where everything is within. The city is so much like a model that it was not necessary to use the lens. Rome and Las Vegas are so known, this was like the depths of the Amazon forest. It is like a biological experiment, growing and growing. It was much more important to show the model like this rather than a model of a model. Filmed in winter, the light was harsher, the colors flatter, unlike the bright spring light in the other two films, there were no shadows. The film is also for the most part silent. At the start there is the sound of the

helicopter which links it to the other films. The film has a subtitle “A Silent Story,” because there is no sound and also because there is a double silence. The silence of China that has done all of this without speaking to the world, building the city and the silence of the west which doesn’t admit that something so big is going on. There is a passage from a counter revolutionary song The East is Red that appears in the film Dongfang Hong (Wang Ping, 1965) – “The east is red, the sun is rising. China has brought forth a Mao Zedong”. The first image of the film is of one of the few remaining statues of Mao. SH You have chosen to present your films as if in a cinema, as film, rather than a video installation. OB The title of the project is site specific_. Really there is nothing site specific except the cities themselves, so there is a bit of a joke there, and it plays with the ideas of the site specific within art. Las Vegas and Rome were shot on 35mm film and Shanghai on High Definition Video, so they are very much film, although I think of them as works for galleries and museums. I added the titles and credits to make a fake real film. SH You have said that you do not want to be a super tourist, the cities you film or photograph are specifically chosen by you. OB The three places I have made films, are very different places, very different cities. It was very interesting to have Rome – Europe, Las Vegas – North America, Shanghai – the east; the three places reinvent the concept of a city. SH The six images chosen to complete the show have a strong sense of the place they depict but are not explicitly of that place. They relate to one another, but they also stand alone, as can the films. You seem to want to show us the world we know in a new and fresh way, from which we can learn and discern things, to shift our desire to see the famous or celebrated. OB It is a confrontation of all the concepts and ideas that we have, from the media, from the culture and iconography of the world. It corresponds to something real and if there is something else, it is in between. It can be a famous building seen in a different way, or to discover something that is very close to an important place that you do not know, or something very similar in places far apart. There is high and low culture, although I don’t agree with this division, so I’m curious to question it. Things are more confused. SH We understand things differently from culture to culture, or at least have some sense of the constant shifts between them. It’s that shift that allows a person to look in a detached way at things, to make assessments and judgments. OB It is also the shape. The shape is what we know, what we see and what we can understand, but it is only a shape. Maybe the real thing to understand is how the shape corresponds, the iconography corresponds, to something real not because it is real for the understanding. Why, on what, and how many – the quantity is important, to understand the bigness of something – because to change the point of view is to change the perception. Maybe my work is not about iconography or representation, before everything was about perception. The way we perceive something is very important, because after we see it we try and understand it, but without a careful perception it is too easy to see what is normal. https://data.bloomberglp.com/space/sites/2/2012/12/Olivo-Barbieri-interview.pdf

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Since 2004, Olivo Barbieri has been developing a series of large-scale aerial photographs on major sites in Rome, Las Vegas, Shanghai, Montreal, Los Angeles, Amman, Florence, Milan, and New York. Utilizing a large format camera with a tilt and shift lens, Barbieri deftly renders the grand scale of these major metropolises to mere models of themselves. His birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye perspectives on some of mankindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greatest architectural achievements, such as the Colosseum seen here, have a mesmerizing quality, simultaneously evocative of our infinitesimal size as individuals yet illuminating of the majesty of our civilizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s progress as a whole.

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The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Idealized Disarray An Interview with Olivo Barbieri

Thru The Lens Magazine

in photography. So the beginning for me was to be between Cartier-Bresson and a movie... I decided night photography and color photography was my field. SH Photographs of urban spaces? OB Yes, city spaces. The first series starts in the European countryside and then moves to city spaces in Paris and Milan like a story. The second series “Artificial Illumination” is a little bit of a confrontation between east and west. There is Hong Kong, Tokyo, Florence, Rome, Paris... so it was also a way to understand the difference between a different kind of life. I was interested in the intimate. SH In your current work, there is a particular attention to the use of focus, specifically the use of a very localized field of sharpness, surrounded by a larger blurred area. OB I was in Tokyo with a friend, an architect and teacher, and we were having a discussion about the contemplative blur of a landscape painted by Gerhard Richter. I said it wasn’t natural, it wasn’t normal, no one sees in this way. My friend wore glasses that he took off and said, “I can assure you that someone does see in that way”. I have a strong reflection of this time and I think, “Yes, this is ok, and true, and perhaps it is interesting to find a view in the middle”. The possibility to see blur and focus at the same time, for me it was a way to have a confrontation between realism and the abstraction. Photography is too descriptive: the landscape with the tree and each single leaf, this was boring for me because the camera makes too many decisions. So I decided I wanted to show what was important in the frame. My first work was for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1999, and they asked me to make a project on Italy. I decided that two things were very important, the San Nicola Stadium in Bari by Renzo Piano and the big trial for mafia corruption. So I started this research, the first was in the stadium and I remember that it was very difficult. I remember thinking, “Now I am here but what can I see? What can I discover that we don’t see every day, every week, through the television?”. I started to work with this idea of soft focus using a tilt-shift lens, and I discovered that not only could I decide what was the important part of an image, but also everything changed. Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered. So I started to do that in several different places in the east and west. It was a very strong discovery, and a very simple one. The camera obscura of Leonardo da Vinci and Canaletto works in the same way. It is a very old device. SH So the work shifted from being narrative-led to one defined by, or at least emerging from, a politicized agenda? Making the world appear as a model, making structures and systems that exist within cities visible, creating comparisons, asking questions? OB For me it was very interesting. There are two situations with this kind of work, that for me are very important. There are many artists who make models and take pictures, in a way that they look like reality. I was much more interested in the contrary, to do a picture of reality that looks like a model. So you have the political possibility to look at it and decide if it is good or not, if you like it or not, if it is good or dangerous. To see something for the first time, it is very, very important, and a very strong possibility for art. At a time where everything is on television, in newspapers, on the Internet... SH These ideas are very apparent in the three films you have made, and are showing at Bloomberg SPACE. When I heard that you were filming Shanghai, I immediately thought of the idea of a trilogy of cities representing the old world, the new world, and the future world. But there is more to it than that, you obviously have a personal relationship to each of these cities and your own ideas as to what they represent. In the case of Rome, you have spoken about a city full of beautiful things, which people wish to come and see; yet it is highly congested as a result. OB Rome in terms of representation is a big problem, because it is a huge postcard. I was interested if it was possible to see it again! After experiencing several places in the east I returned with a better understanding of old Italian cities. I found a new balance I didn’t see before, because everything was so familiar. I decided to make a film of the city, to miniaturize it. I was curious to know what would happen when the focus of the camera moved from one subject to another. Everything looked very different. There was a double distance, one is the very obvious distance of the helicopter from the ground, and the other is the distance created by this kind of vision. SH With Rome you show not only the Roman, the classical and the contemporary, but also the ugliness of our disposable culture that you make appear very beautiful. The piles of discarded cars, things on the periphery of the city that we simply wouldn’t know about, or we glimpse from the window of the bus on the way to the airport. Looking at the range of images within each series of photographs, there is balance between what is known, how it is held within the city, and the unknown and how that exists. With the films we are looking for the things that we know, self affirmation through recognition, waiting for the next place to appear. In the Rome film, you use the noise of the helicopter to break this cycle, as the illusion of the model is broken, especially when its shadow is seen on the square below. OB It was also the shift caused by 9/11, someone flying over the city is a potential danger, and you feel that power. The sound of the helicopter brings this to the fore. It is important to feel this. There are also the areas that are sensitive, such as train stations for example; in Las Vegas it is the desert area where the atom bomb tests were made. Some think that if they have control of the air, they have control of everything. SH Technology has taught us to view things in certain ways. What is interesting is that these are not conventional aerial photographs, they are not satellite shots (the Google understanding of the world or perhaps Pentagon ones). OB It is a way to understand these landscapes and cityscapes. Appearing as a model allows curiosity. Las Vegas is very much like Rome, a theme park of the history of ar-

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chitecture from the pyramid to the Eiffel Tower. It was a big challenge for me because it already looks like a huge model, all these constructions sometimes clumsy, like a cake, so its reality is already questioned. Surrounded by desert, all its energy and water brought from outside, it is very surreal, like a model on a table. A city such a Shanghai exists because of the river, but Las Vegas is completely artificial. Neither of them existed 100-150 years ago – they represent two different developments of a similar age. SH You first visited Shanghai in 1989, and there was only one skyscraper. When you returned last year to make this film the development was remarkable. But you chose to look at the periphery of the city rather than the center. OB It is interesting to understand how the river is important for the existence of the city, so the film starts from one bridge and ends with another, creating a circularity. I asked where the 11 million population of Shanghai lived, as it wasn’t possible that they lived in the city. The helicopter made it possible to see what lay around the center of this city. There is a sprawl of identical houses that looks fake, because there are so many of them. It is huge, the opposite of Las Vegas where everything is within. The city is so much like a model that it was not necessary to use the lens. Rome and Las Vegas are so known, this was like the depths of the Amazon forest. It is like a biological experiment, growing and growing. It was much more important to show the model like this rather than a model of a model. Filmed in winter, the light was harsher, the colors flatter, unlike the bright spring light in the other two films, there were no shadows. The film is also for the most part silent. At the start there is the sound of the helicopter which links it to the other films. The film has a subtitle “A Silent Story,” because there is no sound and also because there is a double silence. The silence of China that has done all of this without speaking to the world, building the city and the silence of the west which doesn’t admit that something so big is going on. There is a passage from a counter revolutionary song The East is Red that appears in the film Dongfang Hong (Wang Ping, 1965) – “The east is red, the sun is rising. China has brought forth a Mao Zedong”. The first image of the film is of one of the few remaining statues of Mao. SH You have chosen to present your films as if in a cinema, as film, rather than a video installation. OB The title of the project is site specific_. Really there is nothing site specific except the cities themselves, so there is a bit of a joke there, and it plays with the ideas of the site specific within art. Las Vegas and Rome were shot on 35mm film and Shanghai on High Definition Video, so they are very much film, although I think of them as works for galleries and museums. I added the titles and credits to make a fake real film. SH You have said that you do not want to be a super tourist, the cities you film or photograph are specifically chosen by you. OB The three places I have made films, are very different places, very different cities. It was very interesting to have Rome – Europe, Las Vegas – North America, Shanghai – the east; the three places reinvent the concept of a city. SH The six images chosen to complete the show have a strong sense of the place they depict but are not explicitly of that place. They relate to one another, but they also stand alone, as can the films. You seem to want to show us the world we know in a new and fresh way, from which we can learn and discern things, to shift our desire to see the famous or celebrated. OB It is a confrontation of all the concepts and ideas that we have, from the media, from the culture and iconography of the world. It corresponds to something real and if there is something else, it is in between. It can be a famous building seen in a different way, or to discover something that is very close to an important place that you do not know, or something very similar in places far apart. There is high and low culture, although I don’t agree with this division, so I’m curious to question it. Things are more confused. SH We understand things differently from culture to culture, or at least have some sense of the constant shifts between them. It’s that shift that allows a person to look in a detached way at things, to make assessments and judgments. OB It is also the shape. The shape is what we know, what we see and what we can understand, but it is only a shape. Maybe the real thing to understand is how the shape corresponds, the iconography corresponds, to something real not because it is real for the understanding. Why, on what, and how many – the quantity is important, to understand the bigness of something – because to change the point of view is to change the perception. Maybe my work is not about iconography or representation, before everything was about perception. The way we perceive something is very important, because after we see it we try and understand it, but without a careful perception it is too easy to see what is normal. https://data.bloomberglp.com/space/sites/2/2012/12/Olivo-Barbieri-interview.pdf

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“Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered.” - Olivo Barbieri

“It is a way to understand these landscapes and cityscapes. Appearing as a model allows curiosity.” - Olivo Barbieri

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Idealized The Art of

Tilt-Shift Lens Photography An Introduction to the Work of Olivo Barbieri

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d D is a rr ay

An Interview with Olivo Barbieri

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Idealized

become accepted just as the snapshot has become recognized as a form for artists to use. Your work seems to exist between the snapshot and more formal work. OB The snapshot is very important to me. The first and biggest influence was Henri Cartier- Bresson. William Eggleston was the first photographer to exhibit in a museum with color photography, and his work shows Cartier-Bresson’s influence. I saw a huge retrospective of Cartier-Bresson from which I understood that he had been everywhere, in a time when it was very difficult to travel. He was doing everything: landscape, portrait... he had not time to think exhaustively about what he was doing. I was very interested in the movies and the use of the night in a story, there was nothing like that in photography. So the beginning for me was to be between Cartier-Bresson and a movie... I decided night photography and color photography was my field. SH Photographs of urban spaces? OB Yes, city spaces. The first series starts in the European countryside and then moves to city spaces in Paris and Milan like a story. The second series “Artificial Illumination” is a little bit of a confrontation between east and west. There is Hong Kong, Tokyo, Florence, Rome, Paris... so it was also a way to understand the difference between a different kind of life. I was interested in the intimate. SH In your current work, there is a particular attention to the use of focus, specifically the use of a very localized field of sharpness, surrounded by a larger blurred area. OB I was in Tokyo with a friend, an architect and teacher, and we were having a discussion about the contemplative blur of a landscape painted by Gerhard Richter. I said it wasn’t natural, it wasn’t normal, no one sees in this way. My friend wore glasses that he took off and said, “I can assure you that someone does see in that way”. I have a strong reflection of this time and I think, “Yes, this is ok, and true, and perhaps it is interesting to find a view in the middle”. The possibility to see blur and focus at the same time, for me it was a way to have a confrontation between realism and the abstraction. Photography is too descriptive: the landscape with the tree and each single leaf, this was boring for me because the camera makes too many decisions. So I decided I wanted to show what was important in the frame. My first work was for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1999, and they asked me to make a project on Italy. I decided that two things were very important, the San Nicola Stadium in Bari by Renzo Piano and the big trial for mafia corruption. So I started this research, the first was in the stadium and I remember that it was very difficult. I remember thinking, “Now I am here but what can I see? What can I discover that we don’t see every day, every week, through the television?”. I started to work with this idea of soft focus using a tilt-shift lens, and I discovered that not only could I decide what was the important part of an image, but also everything changed. Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered. So I started to do that in several different places in the east and west. It was a very strong discovery, and a very simple one. The camera obscura of Leonardo da Vinci and Canaletto works in the same way. It is a very old device. SH So the work shifted from being narrative-led to one defined by, or at least emerging from, a politicized agenda? Making the world appear as a model, making structures and systems that exist within cities visible, creating comparisons, asking questions? OB For me it was very interesting. There are two situations with this kind of work, that for me are very important. There are many artists who make models and take pictures, in a way that they look like reality. I was much more interested in the contrary, to do a picture of reality that looks like a model. So you have the political possibility to look at it and decide if it is good or not, if you like it or not, if it is good or dangerous. To see something for the first time, it is very, very important, and a very strong possibility for art. At a time where everything is on television, in newspapers, on the Internet...

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Idealized SH These ideas are very apparent in the three films you have made, and are showing at Bloomberg SPACE. When I heard that you were filming Shanghai, I immediately thought of the idea of a trilogy of cities representing the old world, the new world, and the future world. But there is more to it than that, you obviously have a personal relationship to each of these cities and your own ideas as to what they represent. In the case of Rome, you have spoken about a city full of beautiful things, which people wish to come and see; yet it is highly congested as a result. OB Rome in terms of representation is a big problem, because it is a huge postcard. I was interested if it was possible to see it again! After experiencing several places in the east I returned with a better understanding of old Italian cities. I found a new balance I didn’t see before, because everything was so familiar. I decided to make a film of the city, to miniaturize it. I was curious to know what would happen when the focus of the camera moved from one subject to another. Everything looked very different. There was a double distance, one is the very obvious distance of the helicopter from the ground, and the other is the distance created by this kind of vision. SH With Rome you show not only the Roman, the classical and the contemporary, but also the ugliness of our disposable culture that you make appear very beautiful. The piles of discarded cars, things on the periphery of the city that we simply wouldn’t know about, or we glimpse from the window of the bus on the way to the airport. Looking at the range of images within each series of photographs, there is balance between what is known, how it is held within the city, and the unknown and how that exists. With the films we are looking for the things that we know, self affirmation through recognition, waiting for the next place to appear. In the Rome film, you use the noise of the helicopter to break this cycle, as the illusion of the model is broken, especially when its shadow is seen on the square below. OB It was also the shift caused by 9/11, someone flying over the city is a potential danger, and you feel that power. The sound of the helicopter brings this to the fore. It is important to feel this. There are also the areas that are sensitive, such as train stations for example; in Las Vegas it is the desert area where the atom bomb tests were made. Some think that if they have control of the air, they have control of everything. SH Technology has taught us to view things in certain ways. What is interesting is that these are not conventional aerial photographs, they are not satellite shots (the Google understanding of the world or perhaps Pentagon ones). OB It is a way to understand these landscapes and cityscapes. Appearing as a model allows curiosity. Las Vegas is very much like Rome, a theme park of the history of architecture from the pyramid to the Eiffel Tower. It was a big challenge for me because it already looks like a huge model, all these constructions sometimes clumsy, like a cake, so its reality is already questioned. Surrounded by desert, all its energy and water brought from outside, it is very surreal, like a model on a table. A city such a Shanghai exists because of the river, but Las Vegas is completely artificial. Neither of them existed 100-150 years ago – they represent two different developments of a similar age. SH You first visited Shanghai in 1989, and there was only one skyscraper. When you returned last year to make this film the development was remarkable. But you chose to look at the periphery of the city rather than the center. OB It is interesting to understand how the river is important for the existence of the city, so the film starts from one bridge and ends with another, creating a circularity. I asked where the 11 million population of Shanghai lived, as it wasn’t possible that they lived in the city. The helicopter made it possible to see what lay around the center of this city. There is a sprawl of identical houses that looks fake, because there are so many of them. It is huge, the opposite of Las Vegas where everything is within. The city is so much like a model that it was not necessary to use the lens. Rome and Las Vegas are so known, this was like the depths

of the Amazon forest. It is like a biological experiment, growing and growing. It was much more important to show the model like this rather than a model of a model. Filmed in winter, the light was harsher, the colors flatter, unlike the bright spring light in the other two films, there were no shadows. The film is also for the most part silent. At the start there is the sound of the helicopter which links it to the other films. The film has a subtitle “A Silent Story,” because there is no sound and also because there is a double silence. The silence of China that has done all of this without speaking to the world, building the city and the silence of the west which doesn’t admit that something so big is going on. There is a passage from a counter revolutionary song The East is Red that appears in the film Dongfang Hong (Wang Ping, 1965) – “The east is red, the sun is rising. China has brought forth a Mao Zedong”. The first image of the film is of one of the few remaining statues of Mao. SH You have chosen to present your films as if in a cinema, as film, rather than a video installation. OB The title of the project is site specific_. Really there is nothing site specific except the cities themselves, so there is a bit of a joke there, and it plays with the ideas of the site specific within art. Las Vegas and Rome were shot on 35mm film and Shanghai on High Definition Video, so they are very much film, although I think of them as works for galleries and museums. I added the titles and credits to make a fake real film. SH You have said that you do not want to be a super tourist, the cities you film or photograph are specifically chosen by you. OB The three places I have made films, are very different places, very different cities. It was very interesting to have Rome – Europe, Las Vegas – North America, Shanghai – the east; the three places reinvent the concept of a city. SH The six images chosen to complete the show have a strong sense of the place they depict but are not explicitly of that place. They relate to one another, but they also stand alone, as can the films. You seem to want to show us the world we know in a new and fresh way, from which we can learn and discern things, to shift our desire to see the famous or celebrated. OB It is a confrontation of all the concepts and ideas that we have, from the media, from the culture and iconography of the world. It corresponds to something real and if there is something else, it is in between. It can be a famous building seen in a different way, or to discover something that is very close to an important place that you do not know, or something very similar in places far apart. There is high and low culture, although I don’t agree with this division, so I’m curious to question it. Things are more confused. SH We understand things differently from culture to culture, or at least have some sense of the constant shifts between them. It’s that shift that allows a person to look in a detached way at things, to make assessments and judgments. OB It is also the shape. The shape is what we know, what we see and what we can understand, but it is only a shape. Maybe the real thing to understand is how the shape corresponds, the iconography corresponds, to something real not because it is real for the understanding. Why, on what, and how many – the quantity is important, to understand the bigness of something – because to change the point of view is to change the perception. Maybe my work is not about iconography or representation, before everything was about perception. The way we perceive something is very important, because after we see it we try and understand it, but without a careful perception it is too easy to see what is normal. https://data.bloomberglp.com/space/sites/2/2012/12/Olivo-Barbieri-interview.pdf

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d D is a rr ay

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Idealized “Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered.” - Olivo Barbieri

“It is a way to understand these landscapes and cityscapes. Appearing as a model allows curiosity.” - Olivo Barbieri

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d D is a rr ay

NATUR SERE

RAL ENITY

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ANSEL ADAMS B&W Landscape Photography

and, by 1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography. If Adams’s love of nature was nurtured in the Golden Gate, his life was, in his words, “colored and modulated by the great earth gesture” of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as “keeper” of the club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge. He became friends with many of the club’s leaders, who were founders of America’s nascent conservation movement. He met his wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The couple had two children. The Sierra Club was vital to Adams’s early success as a photographer. His first published photographs and writings appeared in the club’s 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco headquarters. Each summer the club conducted a month-long High Trip, usually in the Sierra Nevada, which attracted up to two hundred members. The participants hiked each day to a new and beautiful campsite accompanied by a large contingent of pack mules, packers, cooks, and the like. As photographer of these outings, in the late 1920s, Adams began to realize that he could earn enough to survive — indeed, that he was far more likely to prosper as a photographer than as a concert pianist. By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club’s board of directors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite. Nineteen twenty seven was the pivotal year of Adams’s life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first High Trip. More important, he came under the influence of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance magnate and patron of arts and artists. Literally the day after they met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of Adams’ first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras [sic]. Bender’s friendship, encouragement, and

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“

Adam’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal.

“

tactful financial support changed Adams’s life dramatically. His creative energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed, and he began to have the confidence and wherewithal to pursue his dreams. Indeed, Bender’s benign patronage triggered the transformation of a journeyman concert pianist into the artist whose photographs, as critic Abigail Foerstner wrote in the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992), “did for the national parks something comparable to what Homer’s epics did for Odysseus.” Although Adams’s transition from musician to photographer did not happen at once, his passion shifted rapidly after Bender came into his life, and the projects and possibilities multiplied. In addition to spending summers photographing in the Sierra Nevada, Adams made several lengthy trips to the Southwest to work with Mary Austin, grande dame of the western literati. Their magnificent limited edition book, Taos Pueblo, was published in 1930. In the same year Adams met photographer Paul Strand, whose images had a powerful impact on Adams and helped to move him away from the “pictorial” style he had favored in the 1920s. Adams began to pursue “straight photography,” in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the final print gave no appearance of being manipulated in the camera or the darkroom. Adams was soon to become straight photography’s mast articulate and insistent champion. [Ed. Note: Manipulated in this instance meaning altering the clarity or content of the photographed subject matter. Techniques such as “burning” and “dodging”, as well as the Zone System, a scientific system developed by Adams, is used specifically to “manipulate” the tonality and give the artist the ability to create as opposed to record.] In 1927 Adams met photographer Edward Weston, who became increasingly important to him as a friend and colleague. The renowned Group f/64, founded in 1932, coalesced around the recognized greatness of Weston and the dynamic energy of Adams. Although loosely organized and relatively short-lived, Group f/64 brought the new West Coast vision of straight photography to national attention and influence. San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum promptly gave f/64 an exhibition and, in that same year, gave Adams his first one-man museum show.

Adams’s star rose rapidly in the early 1930s, propelled in part by his ability and in part by his effusive energy and activity. He made his first visit to New York in 1933, on a pilgrimage to meet photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the artist whose work and philosophy Adams most admired and whose life of commitment to the medium he consciously emulated. Their relationship was intense and their correspondence frequent, rich, and insightful. Although profoundly a man of the West, Adams spent a considerable amount of time in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Stieglitz circle played a vital role in his artistic life. In 1933 the Delphic Gallery gave Adams his first New York show. His first series of technical articles was published in Camera Craft in 1934, and his first widely distributed book, Making a Photograph, appeared in 1935. Most important, in 1936 Stieglitz gave Adams a one-man show at An American Place. Recognition, however, did not alleviate Adams’s financial pressures. In a letter dated 6 August 1935 he wrote Weston, “I have been busy, but broke. Can’t seem to climb over the financial fence.” Adams was compelled to spend much of his time as a commercial photographer. Clients ran the gamut, including the Yosemite concessionaire, the National Park Service, Kodak, Zeiss, IBM, AT&T, a small women’s college, a dried fruit company, and Life, Fortune, and Arizona Highways magazines — in short, everything from portraits to catalogues to Coloramas. On 2 July 1938 he wrote to friend David McAlpin, “I have to do something in the relatively near future to regain the right track in photography. I am literally swamped with “commercial” work — necessary for practical reasons, but very restraining to my creative work.” Although Adams became an unusually skilled commercial photographer, the work was intermittent, and he constantly worried about paying the next month’s bills. His financial situation remained precarious and a source of considerable stress until late in life. Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. Weston and Strand frequently consulted him for technical advice. He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally,

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to many other photographic concerns. Adams developed the famous and highly complex “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization. He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject. Adams’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal. He often labored for eighteen or more hours per day, for days and weeks on end. There were no vacations, no holidays, no Sundays in Ansel Adams’s life. Frequently, after and intense period of work, he would return to San Francisco or Yosemite, promptly contract the “flu,” and spend several days in bed. His hyper-kinetic existence was also fueled by alcohol, for which he had a particular fondness, and a constant whirl of social activity, friends, and colleagues. As Beaumont Newhall writes in his FOCUS: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (1993), “Ansel was a great party man and loved to entertain. He had a very dominating personality, and would always be the center of attention” (p. 235). Adams described himself as a photographer — lecturer — writer. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that he was simply — indeed, compulsively — a communicator. He endlessly traveled the country in pursuit of both the natural beauty he revered and photographed and the audiences he required. Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting photography as a fine art and played a key role in the establishment of the first museum department of photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work at the museum fostered the closest relationships of Adams’s life, with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, a historian and museum administrator and a writer-designer, respectively. Their partnership was arguably the most potent collaboration in twentieth-century photography. In the 1950s and 1960s Nancy Newhall and Adams created a number of books and exhibitions of historic significance, particularly the Sierra Club’s This is the American Earth (1960), which, with Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, played a seminal role in launching the first broad-based citizen environmental movement. Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. However, his great influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His black-and-white images were not “realistic” documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing.

For Adams, the environmental issues of particular importance were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness. He focused on what he termed the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted the Park Service’s “resortism,” which had led to the over development of the national parks and their domination by private concessionaires. But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions and sea otters, and for clean air and water. An advocate of balanced, restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental mendacity and shortsightedness. Yet he invariably treated his opponents with respect and courtesy. Though wilderness and the environment were his grand passions, photography was his calling, his metier, his raison d’etre. Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental purposes. On 12 April 1977 he wrote to his publisher, Tim Hill, “I know I shall be castigated by a large group of people today, but I was trained to assume that art related to the elusive quality of beauty and that the purpose of art was concerned with the elevation of the spirit (horrible Victorian notion!!)” Adams was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of “humanity” in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that “the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees” (quoted by Adams, Oral History, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, p. 498). Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists. On the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been preserved for all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues. Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography. Adams always claimed he was not “influenced,” but, consciously or unconsciously, he was firmly in the tradition of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Carlton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge. And he was the direct philosophical heir of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. He grew up in a time and place where his zeitgeist was formed by the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and “muscular” Americanism, by the pervading sense of manifest destiny, and the notion that European civilization was being reinvented — much for the better — in the new nation and, particularly, in the new West. Adams died in Monterey, California.

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As John Swarkowski states in the introduction to Adams’s Classic Images (1985), “The love that Americans poured out for the work and person of Ansel Adams during his old age, and that they have continued to express with undiminished enthusiasm since his death, is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even unparalleled in our country’s response to a visual artist” (p. 5). Why should this be so? What generated this remarkable response? Adams’s subject matter, the magnificent natural beauty of the West, was absolutely, unmistakably American, and his chosen instrument, the camera, was a quintessential artifact of the twentieth-century culture. He was blessed with an unusually generous, charismatic personality, and his great faith in people and human nature was amply rewarded. Adams channeled his energies in ways that served his fellow citizens, personified in his lifelong effort to preserve the American wilderness. Above all, Adams’s philosophy and optimism struck a chord in the national phsyche. More than any other influential American of his epoch, Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment. It is difficult to imagine Ansel Adams occurring in a European country or culture and equally difficult to conjure an artist more completely American, either in art of personality. Adams’s vast archive of papers, memorabilia, correspondence, negatives, and many “fine” photographic prints, as well as numerous “work” or proof prints, are in the John P. Schaefer Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. A portion of his papers relating to the Sierra Club are in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Adams’s Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (1985) was unfinished at the time of his death and was subsequently completed by Mary Street Alinder, his editor. An Autobiography offers a somewhat rose-colored and selective view of Adams’s life. A selection of correspondence, Letters and Images (1988), contains a small but interesting fraction of the estimated 100,000 letters and cards that Adams wrote during his lifetime. He wrote and contributed photographs to hundreds of articles and reviews from 1922 until 1984. He published eight portfolios of original photographic prints (1927, 1948, 1950, 1960, 1963, 1970, 1974, 1976). Nearly four dozen books bear Adams’s name as author and/or artist. Those not mentioned in this article include Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938); Michael and Anne in Yosemite Valley (1941); Born Free and Equal (1944); Illustrated Guide to Yosemite Valley (1946); Camera and Lens (1948); The Negative (1948); Yosemite and the High Sierra (1948); The Print (1950); My Camera in Yosemite Valley (1950); My Camera in the National Parks (1950); The Land of Little Rain (1950, new ed. with Adams’s photographs); Natural Light Photography (1952); Death Valley (1954); Mission San Xavier del Bac (1954); The Pageant of History in Northern California (1954); Artificial Light Photography (1956); The Islands of Hawaii (1958); Yosemite Valley (1959); Death Valley and the Creek Called Furnace (1962); These We Inherit: The Parklands of America (1962); Polaroid Land Photography Manual (1963); An Introduction to Hawaii (1964); Fiat Lux: The University of California (1967); The Tetons and the Yellowstone (1970); Ansel Adams (1972); Singular Images (1974); Ansel Adams: Images 1923-1974 (1974); Photographs of the Southwest (1976); The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (1977); Polaroid Land Photography (1978); Yosemite and the Range of Light (1979); a new technical series, including The Camera (1980), The Negative (1981), and The Print (1983); Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (1983); and, posthumously, Andrea G. Stillman, ed., The American Wilderness (1990); Stillman and William A. Turnage, eds. Our National Parks (1992); Harry Callahan, ed., Ansel Adams in Color (1993); and Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: Yosemite and the High Sierra (1994). More than a decade after his death, there was still no biography covering his entire life. Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light (1963), is a relatively short and adoring biography of Adams’s first thirty-six years, written with zest and insight, as well as Adams’s full collaboration.

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ANSEL ADAMS B&W Landscape Photography Adams, Ansel (Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984), photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of 1907, and Adams’s father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to recoup. An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty. His relatively elderly parents, affluent family history, and the live-in presence of his mother’s maiden sister and aged father all combined to create an environment that was decidedly Victorian and both socially and emotionally conservative. Adams’s mother spent much of her time brooding and fretting over her husband’s inability to restore the Adams fortune, leaving an ambivalent imprint on her son. Charles Adams, on the other hand, deeply and patiently influenced, encouraged, and supported his son. Natural shyness and a certain intensity of genius, coupled with the dramatically “earthquaked” nose, caused Adams to have problems fitting in at school. In later life he noted that he might have been diagnosed as hyperactive. There is also the distinct possibility that he may have suffered from dyslexia. He was not successful in the various schools to which his parents sent him; consequently, his father and aunt tutored him at home. Ultimately, he managed to earn what he termed a “legitimizing diploma” from the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School — perhaps equivalent to having completed the eighth grade. The most important result of Adams’s somewhat solitary and unmistakably different childhood was the joy that he found in nature, as evidenced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden Gate. Nearly every day found him hiking the dunes or meandering along Lobos Creek, down to Baker Beach, or out to the very edge of the American continent. When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Soon he was taking lessons, and the ardent pursuit of music became his substitute for formal schooling. For the next dozen years the piano was Adams’s primary occupation and, by 1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a

musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography. If Adams’s love of nature was nurtured in the Golden Gate, his life was, in his words, “colored and modulated by the great earth gesture” of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as “keeper” of the club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge. He became friends with many of the club’s leaders, who were founders of America’s nascent conservation movement. He met his wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The couple had two children. The Sierra Club was vital to Adams’s early success as a photographer. His first published photographs and writings appeared in the club’s 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco headquarters. Each summer the club conducted a month-long High Trip, usually in the Sierra Nevada, which attracted up to two hundred members. The participants hiked each day to a new and beautiful campsite accompanied by a large contingent of pack mules, packers, cooks, and the like. As photographer of these outings, in the late 1920s, Adams began to realize that he could earn enough to survive — indeed, that he was far more likely to prosper as a photographer than as a concert pianist. By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club’s board of directors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite. Nineteen twenty seven was the pivotal year of Adams’s life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first High Trip. More important, he came under the influence of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance magnate and patron of arts and artists. Literally the day after they met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of Adams’ first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras [sic]. Bender’s friendship, encouragement, and tactful financial support changed Adams’s life dramatically. His creative energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed, and he began to have the confidence and wherewithal to pursue his dreams. Indeed, Bender’s benign patronage triggered the transformation of a journeyman concert pianist into the artist whose photographs, as critic Abigail Foerstner wrote in the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992), “did for the national parks something comparable to what Homer’s epics did for Odysseus.”

Although Adams’s transition from musician to photographer did not happen at once, his passion shifted rapidly after Bender came into his life, and the projects and possibilities multiplied. In addition to spending summers photographing in the Sierra Nevada, Adams made several lengthy trips to the Southwest to work with Mary Austin, grande dame of the western literati. Their magnificent limited edition book, Taos Pueblo, was published in 1930. In the same year Adams met photographer Paul Strand, whose images had a powerful impact on Adams and helped to move him away from the “pictorial” style he had favored in the 1920s. Adams began to pursue “straight photography,” in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the final print gave no appearance of being manipulated in the camera or the darkroom. Adams was soon to become straight photography’s mast articulate and insistent champion. [Ed. Note: Manipulated in this instance meaning altering the clarity or content of the photographed subject matter. Techniques such as “burning” and “dodging”, as well as the Zone System, a scientific system developed by Adams, is used specifically to “manipulate” the tonality and give the artist the ability to create as opposed to record.] In 1927 Adams met photographer Edward Weston, who became increasingly important to him as a friend and colleague. The renowned Group f/64, founded in 1932, coalesced around the recognized greatness of Weston and the dynamic energy of Adams. Although loosely organized and relatively short-lived, Group f/64 brought the new West Coast vision of straight photography to national attention and influence. San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum promptly gave f/64 an exhibition and, in that same year, gave Adams his first one-man museum show. Adams’s star rose rapidly in the early 1930s, propelled in part by his ability and in part by his effusive energy and activity. He made his first visit to New York in 1933, on a pilgrimage to meet photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the artist whose work and philosophy Adams most admired and whose life of commitment to the medium he consciously emulated. Their relationship was intense and their correspondence frequent, rich, and insightful. Although profoundly a man of the West, Adams spent a considerable amount of time in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Stieglitz circle played a vital role in his artistic life. In 1933 the Delphic Gallery gave Adams his first New York show. His first series of technical articles was published in Camera Craft in 1934, and his first widely distributed book, Making a Photograph, appeared in 1935. Most important, in 1936 Stieglitz gave Adams a one-man show at An American Place. Recognition, however, did not alleviate Adams’s financial pressures. In a letter dated 6 August 1935 he wrote Weston, “I have

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Adam’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal.

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been busy, but broke. Can’t seem to climb over the financial fence.” Adams was compelled to spend much of his time as a commercial photographer. Clients ran the gamut, including the Yosemite concessionaire, the National Park Service, Kodak, Zeiss, IBM, AT&T, a small women’s college, a dried fruit company, and Life, Fortune, and Arizona Highways magazines — in short, everything from portraits to catalogues to Coloramas. On 2 July 1938 he wrote to friend David McAlpin, “I have to do something in the relatively near future to regain the right track in photography. I am literally swamped with “commercial” work — necessary for practical reasons, but very restraining to my creative work.” Although Adams became an unusually skilled commercial photographer, the work was intermittent, and he constantly worried about paying the next month’s bills. His financial situation remained precarious and a source of considerable stress until late in life. Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. Weston and Strand frequently consulted him for technical advice. He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns. Adams developed the famous and highly complex “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization. He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject. Adams’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal. He often labored for eighteen or more hours per day, for days and weeks on end. There were no vacations, no holidays, no Sundays in Ansel Adams’s life. Frequently, after and intense period of work, he would return to San Francisco or Yosemite, promptly contract the “flu,” and spend several days in bed. His hyper-kinetic existence was also fueled by alcohol, for which he had a particular fondness, and a constant whirl of social activity, friends, and colleagues. As Beaumont Newhall writes in his FOCUS: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (1993), “Ansel was a great party man and loved to entertain. He had a very dominating personality, and would always be the center of attention” (p. 235). Adams described himself as a photographer — lecturer — writer. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that he was simply — indeed, compulsively — a communicator. He endlessly traveled the country in pursuit of both the natural beauty he revered and photographed and the audiences he required. Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting photography as a fine art and played a key role in the establishment of the first museum department of photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work at the museum fostered the closest relationships of Adams’s life, with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, a historian and museum administrator and a writer-designer, respectively. Their partnership was arguably the most potent collaboration in twentieth-century photography. In the 1950s and

1960s Nancy Newhall and Adams created a number of books and exhibitions of historic significance, particularly the Sierra Club’s This is the American Earth (1960), which, with Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, played a seminal role in launching the first broad-based citizen environmental movement. Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. However, his great influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His black-and-white images were not “realistic” documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing. For Adams, the environmental issues of particular importance were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness. He focused on what he termed the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted the Park Service’s “resortism,” which had led to the over development of the national parks and their domination by private concessionaires. But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions and sea otters, and for clean air and water. An advocate of balanced, restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental mendacity and shortsightedness. Yet he invariably treated his opponents with respect and courtesy. Though wilderness and the environment were his grand passions, photography was his calling, his metier, his raison d’etre. Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental purposes. On 12 April 1977 he wrote to his publisher, Tim Hill, “I know I shall be castigated by a large group of people today, but I was trained to assume that art related to the elusive quality of beauty and that the purpose of art was concerned with the elevation of the spirit (horrible Victorian notion!!)” Adams was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of “humanity” in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that “the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees” (quoted by Adams, Oral History, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, p. 498). Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists. On the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been pre-

served for all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues. Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography. Adams always claimed he was not “influenced,” but, consciously or unconsciously, he was firmly in the tradition of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Carlton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge. And he was the direct philosophical heir of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. He grew up in a time and place where his zeitgeist was formed by the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and “muscular” Americanism, by the pervading sense of manifest destiny, and the notion that European civilization was being reinvented — much for the better — in the new nation and, particularly, in the new West. Adams died in Monterey, California. As John Swarkowski states in the introduction to Adams’s Classic Images (1985), “The love that Americans poured out for the work and person of Ansel Adams during his old age, and that they have continued to express with undiminished enthusiasm since his death, is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even unparalleled in our country’s response to a visual artist” (p. 5). Why should this be so? What generated this remarkable response? Adams’s subject matter, the magnificent natural beauty of the West, was absolutely, unmistakably American, and his chosen instrument, the camera, was a quintessential artifact of the twentieth-century culture. He was blessed with an unusually generous, charismatic personality, and his great faith in people and human nature was amply rewarded. Adams channeled his energies in ways that served his fellow citizens, personified in his lifelong effort to preserve the American wilderness. Above all, Adams’s philosophy and optimism struck a chord in the national phsyche. More than any other influential American of his epoch, Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment. It is difficult to imagine Ansel Adams occurring in a European country or culture and equally difficult to conjure an artist more completely American, either in art of personality. Adams’s vast archive of papers, memorabilia, correspondence, negatives, and many “fine” photographic prints, as well as numerous “work” or proof prints, are in the John P. Schaefer Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. A portion of his papers relating to the Sierra Club are in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Adams’s Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (1985) was unfinished at the time of his death and was subsequently completed by Mary Street Alinder, his editor. An Autobiography offers a somewhat rose-colored and selective view of Adams’s life. A selection of correspondence, Letters and Images (1988), contains a small but interesting fraction of the estimated 100,000 letters and cards that Adams wrote during his lifetime. He wrote and contributed

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photographs to hundreds of articles and reviews from 1922 until 1984. He published eight portfolios of original photographic prints (1927, 1948, 1950, 1960, 1963, 1970, 1974, 1976). Nearly four dozen books bear Adams’s name as author and/or artist. Those not mentioned in this article include Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938); Michael and Anne in Yosemite Valley (1941); Born Free and Equal (1944); Illustrated Guide to Yosemite Valley (1946); Camera and Lens (1948); The Negative (1948); Yosemite and the High Sierra (1948); The Print (1950); My Camera in Yosemite Valley (1950); My Camera in the National Parks (1950); The Land of Little Rain (1950, new ed. with Adams’s photographs); Natural Light Photography (1952); Death Valley (1954); Mission San Xavier del Bac (1954); The Pageant of History in Northern California (1954); Artificial Light Photography (1956); The Islands of Hawaii (1958); Yosemite Valley (1959); Death Valley and the Creek Called Furnace (1962); These We Inherit: The Parklands of America (1962); Polaroid Land Photography Manual (1963); An Introduction to Hawaii (1964); Fiat Lux: The University of California (1967); The Tetons and the Yellowstone (1970); Ansel Adams (1972); Singular Images (1974); Ansel Adams: Images 1923-1974 (1974); Photographs of the Southwest (1976); The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (1977); Polaroid Land Photography (1978); Yosemite and the Range of Light (1979); a new technical series, including The Camera (1980), The Negative (1981), and The Print (1983); Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (1983); and, posthumously, Andrea G. Stillman, ed., The American Wilderness (1990); Stillman and William A. Turnage, eds. Our National Parks (1992); Harry Callahan, ed., Ansel Adams in Color (1993); and Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: Yosemite and the High Sierra (1994). More than a decade after his death, there was still no biography covering his entire life. Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light (1963), is a relatively short and adoring biography of Adams’s first thirty-six years, written with zest and insight, as well as Adams’s full collaboration. http://anseladams.com/ansel-adams-bio/

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ANSEL ADAMS B&W Landscape Photography

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Adam’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal.

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FOCUS: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (1993), “Ansel was a great party man and loved to entertain. He had a very dominating personality, and would always be the center of attention” (p. 235). Adams described himself as a photographer — lecturer — writer. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that he was simply — indeed, compulsively — a communicator. He endlessly traveled the country in pursuit of both the natural beauty he revered and photographed and the audiences he required. Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting photography as a fine art and played a key role in the establishment of the first museum department of photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work at the museum fostered the closest relationships of Adams’s life, with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, a historian and museum administrator and a writer-designer, respectively. Their partnership was arguably the most potent collaboration in twentieth-century photography. In the 1950s and 1960s Nancy Newhall and Adams created a number of books and exhibitions of historic significance, particularly the Sierra Club’s This is the American Earth (1960), which, with Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, played a seminal role in launching the first broad-based citizen environmental movement. Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. However, his great influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His black-and-white images were not “realistic” documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing. For Adams, the environmental issues of particular importance were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness. He focused on what he termed the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted the Park Service’s “resortism,” which had led to the over development of the national parks and their domination by private concessionaires. But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions and sea otters, and for clean air and water. An advocate of balanced, restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental mendacity and shortsightedness. Yet he invariably treated his opponents with respect and courtesy.

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Though wilderness and the environment were his grand passions, photography was his calling, his metier, his raison d’etre. Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental purposes. On 12 April 1977 he wrote to his publisher, Tim Hill, “I know I shall be castigated by a large group of people today, but I was trained to assume that art related to the elusive quality of beauty and that the purpose of art was concerned with the elevation of the spirit (horrible Victorian notion!!)” Adams was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of “humanity” in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that “the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees” (quoted by Adams, Oral History, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, p. 498). Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists. On the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been preserved for all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues. Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography. Adams always claimed he was not “influenced,” but, consciously or unconsciously, he was firmly in the tradition of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Carlton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge. And he was the direct philosophical heir of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. He grew up in a time and place where his zeitgeist was formed by the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and “muscular” Americanism, by the pervading sense of manifest destiny, and the notion that European civilization was being reinvented — much for the better — in the new nation and, particularly, in the new West. Adams died in Monterey, California. As John Swarkowski states in the introduction to Adams’s Classic Images (1985), “The love that Americans poured out for the work and person of Ansel Adams during his old age, and that they have continued to express with undiminished enthusiasm since his death, is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even unparalleled in our country’s response to a visual artist” (p. 5). Why should this be so? What generated this remarkable response? Adams’s subject matter, the magnificent natural beauty of the West, was absolutely, unmistakably American, and his chosen instrument, the camera, was a quintessential artifact of the twentieth-century culture. He was blessed with an unusually generous, charismatic personality, and his great faith in people and human nature was amply rewarded. Adams channeled his energies in ways that served his fellow citizens, personified in his lifelong effort to preserve the American wilderness. Above all, Adams’s philosophy and optimism struck a chord in the national phsyche. More than any other influential American of his epoch, Adams believed

in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment. It is difficult to imagine Ansel Adams occurring in a European country or culture and equally difficult to conjure an artist more completely American, either in art of personality. Adams’s vast archive of papers, memorabilia, correspondence, negatives, and many “fine” photographic prints, as well as numerous “work” or proof prints, are in the John P. Schaefer Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. A portion of his papers relating to the Sierra Club are in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Adams’s Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (1985) was unfinished at the time of his death and was subsequently completed by Mary Street Alinder, his editor. An Autobiography offers a somewhat rose-colored and selective view of Adams’s life. A selection of correspondence, Letters and Images (1988), contains a small but interesting fraction of the estimated 100,000 letters and cards that Adams wrote during his lifetime. He wrote and contributed photographs to hundreds of articles and reviews from 1922 until 1984. He published eight portfolios of original photographic prints (1927, 1948, 1950, 1960, 1963, 1970, 1974, 1976). Nearly four dozen books bear Adams’s name as author and/or artist. Those not mentioned in this article include Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938); Michael and Anne in Yosemite Valley (1941); Born Free and Equal (1944); Illustrated Guide to Yosemite Valley (1946); Camera and Lens (1948); The Negative (1948); Yosemite and the High Sierra (1948); The Print (1950); My Camera in Yosemite Valley (1950); My Camera in the National Parks (1950); The Land of Little Rain (1950, new ed. with Adams’s photographs); Natural Light Photography (1952); Death Valley (1954); Mission San Xavier del Bac (1954); The Pageant of History in Northern California (1954); Artificial Light Photography (1956); The Islands of Hawaii (1958); Yosemite Valley (1959); Death Valley and the Creek Called Furnace (1962); These We Inherit: The Parklands of America (1962); Polaroid Land Photography Manual (1963); An Introduction to Hawaii (1964); Fiat Lux: The University of California (1967); The Tetons and the Yellowstone (1970); Ansel Adams (1972); Singular Images (1974); Ansel Adams: Images 1923-1974 (1974); Photographs of the Southwest (1976); The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (1977); Polaroid Land Photography (1978); Yosemite and the Range of Light (1979); a new technical series, including The Camera (1980), The Negative (1981), and The Print (1983); Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (1983); and, posthumously, Andrea G. Stillman, ed., The American Wilderness (1990); Stillman and William A. Turnage, eds. Our National Parks (1992); Harry Callahan, ed., Ansel Adams in Color (1993); and Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: Yosemite and the High Sierra (1994). More than a decade after his death, there was still no biography covering his entire life. Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light (1963), is a relatively short and adoring biography of Adams’s first thirty-six years, written with zest and insight, as well as Adams’s full collaboration. http://anseladams.com/ansel-adams-bio/

SUSAN SONTAG

PHOTOGRAPHY

“

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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past

and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations.

“

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In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is

an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

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ON PHOTO

SUSAN SONTAG

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OGRAPHY

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ON PHOTO Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations.

Thru The Lens Magazine

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is

SUSAN SONTAG

PHOTO

OGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAG

PHOTO

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past

OGRAPHY In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

SUSAN SONTAG

Step 4

Initial Cover Design

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

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Olivo Barbieri

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The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Olivo Barbieri

Olivo Barbieri The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Olivo Barbieri

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography THRU THE LENS

THRU THE LENS

Olivo Barbieri

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Olivo Barbieri

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

THRU THE LENS

Olivo Barbieri The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

THRU THE LENS

Olivo Barbieri The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

Olivo Barbieri THRU THE LENS

Step 5

Refined Spreads

Idealized Disarray The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

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An Interview with

Olivo Barbieri Since the end of the 19th century, as populations swelled and an urban existence was defined, the city has provided a significant subject for the modern artist. The concurrent development of the camera provided a means to create an objective accuracy, or a closeness to life, which recorded these new places – their streets, buildings, modes of transportation, people and their lives. This documentary tradition has remained an important part of photographic practice. Photography becomes a tool to create the abstract, and it offers the possibility to create fiction – through recording staged scenarios and capturing the ambiguity between objects and people. For over 20 years, Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri’s work has focused on cities and their inhabitants. Barbieri’s photographs and his more recent films seem to exist between documentary and fiction. At first glance, the scenes we see in Olivo Barbieri’s photographs and films seem to be of detailed models. They are, in fact, shot on 35mm film or HDV (High Definition Video) from a helicopter that moves across and around each city. Through the manipulation of focus, by playing with the viewer’s sense of scale and distance, Barbieri redefines the sense of urban space. The city and its edges are watched from above; specific locations, some of them on our tourist maps, are somehow made unreal. Separated from function and the everyday, they become unfamiliar; it is as if we are seeing them for the first time. In this way, the work is within a tradition of the photographic image, a sense of strangeness forcing us to think about the real and the unreal – how the ‘fact’ of an image can blur into a fiction and elude the notion of things being fixed. The films are also about organization and chaos. At times, the city appears as an organic singularity, every section or quarter playing a vital role in a complex interweaving of public and private, new and old. Suddenly its fragmentary nature reappears – a car wrecking lot borders on an ancient site – and a sense of the arbitrary creeps in. Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi (1982) established this sense of design and fracture, stretching and compressing the film medium in more complicated ways; time lapse was frequently used, bringing pattern and rhythm to the proceedings. Barbieri’s means are much more

economic, his process simpler and therefore, the space opened up to the audience more dynamic. The viewer is aware of looking and hearing in a particular way, through a lens that enforces a distance and through the subtle use of sound, silence and speed. Stephen Hepworth: How did you become interested in photography, how did you become a photographer? Olivo Barbieri: When I was sixteen, I was at the sea – it was a beautiful day with beautiful light. I had a magazine, and what was in the magazine was not what was around me. So I thought why? And I decided that this is what I wanted to do. I was interested in what was around me – the world – but also the town, the periphery. For my generation, it was much easier to use photography like art than those before. There were many artist photographers, but very few decided to use photography like an art. They were interested in reportage or documentary...famous photographers like Eugène Atget and August Sander; it is difficult to say that they wanted to be artists – the first, perhaps were born two years before me or just after in the USA, England, Germany, emerging in the late 70s and early 80s as important artist photographers. I encountered the work of Man Ray and Andy Warhol, and they were the biggest influences on my work. They are very different, but they work with the idea, the concept of the representation of the contemporary, in a different way, with a different quality, at a different time – which is very interesting and important to me. From the beginning I decided that it was very important to do it in color, because color at this time was something for advertising and industrial representation. Everybody said that color photography was not art. SH: Color was very modern, very contemporary, it spoke of the nowness of the world you wanted to capture and has of course become accepted just as the snapshot has become recognized as a form for artists to use. Your work seems to exist between the snapshot and

more formal work. OB: The snapshot is very important to me. The first and biggest influence was Henri Cartier- Bresson. William Eggleston was the first photographer to exhibit in a museum with color photography, and his work shows Cartier-Bresson’s influence. I saw a huge retrospective of Cartier-Bresson from which I understood that he had been everywhere, in a time when it was very difficult to travel. He was doing everything: landscape, portrait... he had not time to think exhaustively about what he was doing. I was very interested in the movies and the use of the night in a story, there was nothing like that in photography. So the beginning for me was to be between Cartier-Bresson and a movie... I decided night photography and color photography was my field. SH: Photographs of urban spaces? OB: Yes, city spaces. The first series starts in the European countryside and then moves to city spaces in Paris and Milan like a story. The second series “Artificial Illumination” is a little bit of a confrontation between east and west. There is Hong Kong, Tokyo, Florence, Rome, Paris... so it was also a way to understand the difference between a different kind of life. I was interested in the intimate. SH: In your current work, there is a particular attention to the use of focus, specifically the use of a very localized field of sharpness, surrounded by a larger blurred area. OB: I was in Tokyo with a friend, an architect and teacher, and we were having a discussion about the contemplative blur of a landscape painted by Gerhard Richter. I said it wasn’t natural, it wasn’t normal, no one sees in this way. My friend wore glasses that he took off and said, “I can assure you that someone does see in that way”. I have a strong reflection of this time and I think, “Yes, this is ok, and true, and perhaps it is interesting to find a view in the middle”. The possibility to see blur and focus at the same time, for me it was a way to have a confrontation between realism and the abstraction. Photography is too descriptive: the landscape with the tree and each single leaf, this was boring for me because the camera makes too many decisions. So I decided I wanted to show what was important in the frame. My first work was for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1999, and they asked me to make a project on Italy. I decided that two things were very important, the San Nicola Stadium in Bari by Renzo Piano and the big trial for mafia corruption. So I started this research, the first was in the stadium and I remember that

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it was very difficult. I remember thinking, “Now I am here but what can I see? What can I discover that we don’t see every day, every week, through the television?”. I started to work with this idea of soft focus using a tilt-shift lens, and I discovered that not only could I decide what was the important part of an image, but also everything changed. Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered. So I started to do that in several different places in the east and west. It was a very strong discovery, and a very simple one. The camera obscura of Leonardo da Vinci and Canaletto works in the same way. It is a very old device. SH: So the work shifted from being narrative-led to one defined by, or at least emerging from, a politicized agenda? Making the world appear as a model, making structures and systems that exist within cities visible, creating comparisons, asking questions? OB: For me it was very interesting. There are two situations with this kind of work, that for me are very important. There are many artists who make models and take pictures, in a way that they look like reality. I was much more interested in the contrary, to do a picture of reality that looks like a model. So you have the political possibility to look at it and decide if it is good or not, if you like it or not, if it is good or dangerous. To see something for the first time, it is very, very important, and a very strong possibility for art. At a time where everything is on television, in newspapers, on the Internet... SH: With Rome you show not only the Roman, the classical and the contemporary, but also the ugliness of our disposable culture that you make appear very beautiful. The piles of discarded cars, things on the periphery of the city that we simply wouldn’t know about, or we glimpse from the window of the bus on the way to the airport. Looking at the range of images within each series of photographs, there is balance between what is known, how it is held within the city, and the

unknown and how that exists. With the films we are looking for the things that we know, self affirmation through recognition, waiting for the next place to appear. In the Rome film, you use the noise of the helicopter to break this cycle, as the illusion of the model is broken, especially when its shadow is seen on the square below. OB: It was also the shift caused by 9/11, someone flying over the city is a potential danger, and you feel that power. The sound of the helicopter brings this to the fore. It is important to feel this. There are also the areas that are sensitive, such as train stations for example; in Las Vegas it is the desert area where the atom bomb tests were made. Some think that if they have control of the air, they have control of everything. SH: Technology has taught us to view things in certain ways. What is interesting is that these are not conventional aerial photographs, they are not satellite shots (the Google understanding of the world or perhaps Pentagon ones). OB: It is a way to understand these landscapes and cityscapes. Appearing as a model allows curiosity. Las Vegas is very much like Rome, a theme park of the history of architecture from the pyramid to the Eiffel Tower. It was a big challenge for me because it already looks like a huge model, all these constructions sometimes clumsy, like a cake, so its reality is already questioned. Surrounded by desert, all its energy and water brought from outside, it is very surreal, like a model on a table. A city such a Shanghai exists because of the river, but Las Vegas is completely artificial. Neither of them existed 100-150 years ago – they represent two different developments of a similar age. SH: You first visited Shanghai in 1989, and there was only one skyscraper. When you returned last year to make this film the development was remarkable. But you chose to look at the periphery of the city rather than the center. OB: It is interesting to understand how the river is im-

Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered.

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portant for the existence of the city, so the film starts from one bridge and ends with another, creating a circularity. I asked where the 11 million population of Shanghai lived, as it wasn’t possible that they lived in the city. The helicopter made it possible to see what lay around the center of this city. There is a sprawl of identical houses that looks fake, because there are so many of them. It is huge, the opposite of Las Vegas where everything is within. The city is so much like a model that it was not necessary to use the lens. Rome and Las Vegas are so known, this was like the depths of the Amazon forest. It is like a biological experiment, growing and growing. It was much more important to show the model like this rather than a model of a model. Filmed in winter, the light was harsher, the colors flatter, unlike the bright spring light in the other two films, there were no shadows. The film is also for the most part silent. At the start there is the sound of the helicopter which links it to the other films. The film has a subtitle “A Silent Story,” because there is no sound and also because there is a double silence. The silence of China that has done all of this without speaking to the world, building the city and the silence of the west which doesn’t admit that something so big is going on. There is a passage from a counter revolutionary song The East is Red that appears in the film Dongfang Hong (Wang Ping, 1965) – “The east is red, the sun is rising. China has brought forth a Mao Zedong”. The first image of the film is of one of the few remaining statues of Mao. SH: You have chosen to present your films as if in a cinema, as film, rather than a video installation. OB: The title of the project is site specific_. Really there is nothing site specific except the cities themselves, so there is a bit of a joke there, and it plays with the ideas of the site specific within art. Las Vegas and Rome were shot on

35mm film and Shanghai on High Definition Video, so they are very much film, although I think of them as works for galleries and museums. I added the titles and credits to make a fake real film. SH: You have said that you do not want to be a super tourist, the cities you film or photograph are specifically chosen by you. OB: The three places I have made films, are very different places, very different cities. It was very interesting to have Rome – Europe, Las Vegas – North America, Shanghai – the east; the three places reinvent the concept of a city. SH: The six images chosen to complete the show have a strong sense of the place they depict but are not explicitly of that place. They relate to one another, but they also stand alone, as can the films. You seem to want to show us the world we know in a new and fresh way, from which we can learn and discern things, to shift our desire to see the famous or celebrated. OB: It is a confrontation of all the concepts and ideas that we have, from the media, from the culture and iconography of the world. It corresponds to something real and if there is something else, it is in between. It can be a famous building seen in a different way, or to discover something that is very close to an important place that you do not know, or something very similar in places far apart. There is high and low culture, although I don’t agree with this division, so I’m curious to question it. Things are more confused. SH: We understand things differently from culture to culture, or at least have some sense of the constant shifts between them. It’s that shift that allows a person to look in a detached way at things, to make assessments and judgments. OB: It is also the shape. The shape is what we know, what we see and what we can understand, but it is only a shape. Maybe the real thing to understand is how the shape corresponds, the iconography corresponds, to something real not because it is real for the understanding. Why, on what, and how many – the quantity is important, to understand the bigness of something – because to change the point of view is to change the perception. Maybe my work is not about iconography or representation, before everything was about perception. The way we perceive something is very important, because after we see it we try and understand it, but without a careful perception it is too easy to see what is normal.

NATUR SERE

RAL ENITY ANSEL ADAMS

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B&W Landscape Photography Adams, Ansel (Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984), photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of 1907, and Adams’s father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to recoup. An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty. His relatively elderly parents, affluent family history, and the live-in presence of his mother’s maiden sister and aged father all combined to create an environment that was decidedly Victorian and both socially and emotionally conservative. Adams’s mother spent much of her time brooding and fretting over her husband’s inability to restore the Adams fortune, leaving an ambivalent imprint on her son. Charles Adams, on the other hand, deeply and patiently influenced, encouraged, and supported his son. Natural shyness and a certain intensity of genius, coupled with the dramatically “earthquaked” nose, caused Adams to have problems fitting in at school. In later life he noted that he might have been diagnosed as hyperactive. There is also the distinct possibility that he may have suffered from dyslexia. He was not successful in the various schools to which his parents sent him; consequently, his father and aunt tutored him at home. Ultimately, he managed to earn what he termed a “legitimizing diploma” from the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School — perhaps equivalent to having completed the eighth grade. The most important result of Adams’s somewhat solitary and unmistakably different childhood was the joy that he found in nature, as evi-

denced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden Gate. Nearly every day found him hiking the dunes or meandering along Lobos Creek, down to Baker Beach, or out to the very edge of the American continent. When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Soon he was taking lessons, and the ardent pursuit of music became his substitute for formal schooling. For the next dozen years the piano was Adams’s primary occupation and, by 1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography. If Adams’s love of nature was nurtured in the Golden Gate, his life was, in his words, “colored and modulated by the great earth gesture” of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as “keeper” of the club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge. He became friends with many of the club’s leaders, who were founders of America’s nascent conservation movement. He met his wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The couple had two children. Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. Weston and Strand frequently consulted him for technical advice. He served as principal photographic consultant

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Adam’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal.

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to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns. Adams developed the famous and highly complex “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization. He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject. Adams’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal. He often labored for eighteen or more hours per day, for days and weeks on end. There were no vacations, no holidays, no Sundays in Ansel Adams’s life. Frequently, after and intense period of work, he would return to San Francisco or Yosemite, promptly contract the “flu,” and spend several days in bed. His hyper-kinetic existence was also fueled by alcohol, for which he had a particular fondness, and a constant whirl of social activity, friends, and colleagues. As Beaumont Newhall writes in his FOCUS: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (1993), “Ansel was a great party man and loved to entertain. He had a very dominating personality, and would always be the center of attention” (p. 235). Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. However, his great influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His black-and-white images were not “realistic” documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer

with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing. For Adams, the environmental issues of particular importance were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness. He focused on what he termed the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted the Park Service’s “resortism,” which had led to the over development of the national parks and their domination by private concessionaires. But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions and sea otters, and for clean air and water. An advocate of balanced, restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental mendacity and shortsightedness. Yet he invariably treated his opponents with respect and courtesy. Though wilderness and the environment were his grand passions, photography was his calling, his metier, his raison d’etre. Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental purposes. On 12 April 1977 he wrote to his publisher, Tim Hill, “I know I shall be castigated by a large group of people today, but I was trained to assume that art related to the elusive quality of beauty and that the purpose of art was concerned with the elevation of the spirit (horrible Victorian notion!!)” Adams was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of “humanity” in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that “the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees” (quoted by Adams, Oral History, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, p. 498). Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists. On the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness

and park areas that have been preserved for all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues. Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography. Adams always claimed he was not “influenced,” but, consciously or unconsciously, he was firmly in the tradition of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Carlton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge. And he was the direct philosophical heir of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. He grew up in a time and place where his zeitgeist was formed by the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and “muscular” Americanism, by the pervading sense of manifest destiny, and the notion that European civilization was being reinvented — much for the better — in the new nation and, particularly, in the new West. Adams died in Monterey, California. Adams’s subject matter, the magnificent natural beauty of the West, was absolutely, unmistakably American, and his chosen instrument, the camera, was a quintessential artifact of the twentieth-century culture. He was blessed with an unusually generous, charismatic personality, and his great faith in people and human nature was amply rewarded. Adams channeled his energies in ways that served his fellow citizens, personified in his lifelong effort to preserve the American wilderness. Above all, Adams’s philosophy and optimism struck a chord in the national phsyche. More than any other influential American of his epoch, Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment.

SUSAN SONTAG

PHOTOGRAPHY

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Thru The Lens Idealized Disarray and Natural Serenity

Volume 3 Spring 2017

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Volume 3 Spring 2017

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Idealized Disarray and Natural Serenity

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Volume 3 Spring 2017

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ADRIATIC SEA (STAGED) DANCING PEOPLE 2015, Olivo Barbieri

T.A. VIEIRA PHOTOGRAPHY

Cover Image: Tibet 2000, Olivo Barbieri

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ON PHOTOGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAG

McGown Peak Reflected on Stanley Lake, Ansel Adams

IDEALIZED DISARRAY OLIVO BARBIERI

NATURAL SERENITY ANSEL ADAMS

SUSAN SONTAG

PHOTOGRAPHY

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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads - as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past

and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality - photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid - and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In an-

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other version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph - any photograph - seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film - the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity - and ubiquity - of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is

an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption - the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed - seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Idealized Disarray The Art of Tilt-Shift Lens Photography

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An Interview with

THE WATERFALL PROJECT 2006/07, Olivo Barbieri

site specific_SHANGHAI 04, Olivo Barbieri

OB: The snapshot is very important to me. The first and biggest influence was Henri Cartier- Bresson. William Eggleston was the first photographer to exhibit in a museum with color photography, and his work shows Cartier-Bresson’s influence. I saw a huge retrospective of Cartier-Bresson from which I understood that he had been everywhere, in a time when it was very difficult to travel. He was doing everything: landscape, portrait... he had not time to think exhaustively about what he was doing. I was very interested in the movies and the use of the night in a story, there was nothing like that in photography. So the beginning for me was to be between Cartier-Bresson and a movie... I decided night photography and color photography was my field. SH: Photographs of urban spaces? OB: Yes, city spaces. The first series starts in the European countryside and then moves to city spaces in Paris and Milan like a story. The second series “Artificial Illumination” is a little bit of a confrontation between east and west. There is Hong Kong, Tokyo, Florence, Rome, Paris... so it was also a way to understand the difference between a different kind of life. I was interested in the intimate. SH: In your current work, there is a particular attention to the use of focus, specifically the use of a very localized field of sharpness, surrounded by a larger blurred area. OB: I was in Tokyo with a friend, an architect and teacher, and we were having a discussion about the contemplative blur of a landscape painted by Gerhard Richter. I said it wasn’t natural, it wasn’t normal, no one sees in this way. My friend wore glasses that he took off and said, “I can assure you that someone does see in that way”. I have a strong reflection of this time and I think, “Yes, this is ok, and true, and perhaps it is interesting to find a view in the middle”. The possibility to see blur and focus at the same time, for me it was a way to have a confrontation between realism and the abstraction. Photography is too descriptive: the landscape with the tree and each single leaf, this was boring for me because the camera makes too many decisions. So I decided I wanted to show what was important in the frame. My first work was for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1999, and they asked me to make a project on Italy. I decided that two things were very important, the San Nicola Stadium in Bari by Renzo Piano and the big trial for mafia corruption. So I started this research, the first was in the stadium and I remember that it was very difficult. I remember thinking, “Now I am here

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but what can I see? What can I discover that we don’t see every day, every week, through the television?”. I started to work with this idea of soft focus using a tilt-shift lens, and I discovered that not only could I decide what was the important part of an image, but also everything changed. Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered. So I started to do that in several different places in the east and west. It was a very strong discovery, and a very simple one. The camera obscura of Leonardo da Vinci and Canaletto works in the same way. It is a very old device. SH: So the work shifted from being narrative-led to one defined by, or at least emerging from, a politicized agenda? Making the world appear as a model, making structures and systems that exist within cities visible, creating comparisons, asking questions? OB: For me it was very interesting. There are two situations with this kind of work, that for me are very important. There are many artists who make models and take pictures, in a way that they look like reality. I was much more interested in the contrary, to do a picture of reality that looks like a model. So you have the political possibility to look at it and decide if it is good or not, if you like it or not, if it is good or dangerous. To see something for the first time, it is very, very important, and a very strong possibility for art. At a time where everything is on television, in newspapers, on the Internet... SH: With Rome you show not only the Roman, the classical and the contemporary, but also the ugliness of our disposable culture that you make appear very beautiful. The piles of discarded cars, things on the periphery of the city that we simply wouldn’t know about, or we glimpse from the window of the bus on the way to the airport. Looking at the range of images within each series of photographs, there is balance between what is known, how it is held within the city, and the unknown and how that exists. With the films we are looking for the

things that we know, self affirmation through recognition, waiting for the next place to appear. In the Rome film, you use the noise of the helicopter to break this cycle, as the illusion of the model is broken, especially when its shadow is seen on the square below. OB: It was also the shift caused by 9/11, someone flying over the city is a potential danger, and you feel that power. The sound of the helicopter brings this to the fore. It is important to feel this. There are also the areas that are sensitive, such as train stations for example; in Las Vegas it is the desert area where the atom bomb tests were made. Some think that if they have control of the air, they have control of everything. SH: Technology has taught us to view things in certain ways. What is interesting is that these are not conventional aerial photographs, they are not satellite shots (the Google understanding of the world or perhaps Pentagon ones). OB: It is a way to understand these landscapes and cityscapes. Appearing as a model allows curiosity. Las Vegas is very much like Rome, a theme park of the history of architecture from the pyramid to the Eiffel Tower. It was a big challenge for me because it already looks like a huge model, all these constructions sometimes clumsy, like a cake, so its reality is already questioned. Surrounded by desert, all its energy and water brought from outside, it is very surreal, like a model on a table. A city such a Shanghai exists because of the river, but Las Vegas is completely artificial. Neither of them existed 100-150 years ago – they represent two different developments of a similar age. SH: You first visited Shanghai in 1989, and there was only one skyscraper. When you returned last year to make this film the development was remarkable. But you chose to look at the periphery of the city rather than the center. OB: It is interesting to understand how the river is important for the existence of the city, so the film starts from

site specific_ROMA 04, Olivo Barbieri

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one bridge and ends with another, creating a circularity. I asked where the 11 million population of Shanghai lived, as it wasn’t possible that they lived in the city. The helicopter made it possible to see what lay around the center of this city. There is a sprawl of identical houses that looks fake, because there are so many of them. It is huge, the opposite of Las Vegas where everything is within. The city is so much like a model that it was not necessary to use the lens. Rome and Las Vegas are so known, this was like the depths of the Amazon forest. It is like a biological experiment, growing and growing. It was much more important to show the model like this rather than a model of a model. Filmed in winter, the light was harsher, the colors flatter, unlike the bright spring light in the other two films, there were no shadows. The film is also for the most part silent. At the start there is the sound of the helicopter which links it to the other films. The film has a subtitle “A Silent Story,” because there is no sound and also because there is a double silence. The silence of China that has done all of this without speaking to the world, building the city and the silence of the west which doesn’t admit that something so big is going on. There is a passage from a counter revolutionary song The East is Red that appears in the film Dongfang Hong (Wang Ping, 1965) – “The east is red, the sun is rising. China has brought forth a Mao Zedong”. The first image of the film is of one of the few remaining statues of Mao. SH: You have chosen to present your films as if in a cinema, as film, rather than a video installation. OB: The title of the project is site specific_. Really there is nothing site specific except the cities themselves, so there is a bit of a joke there, and it plays with the ideas of the site specific within art. Las Vegas and Rome were shot on 35mm film and Shanghai on High Definition Video, so they

Things looked like a model, the relationship of space and building had completely altered.

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site specific_SAN FRANCISCO 08, Olivo Barbieri

are very much film, although I think of them as works for galleries and museums. I added the titles and credits to make a fake real film. SH: You have said that you do not want to be a super tourist, the cities you film or photograph are specifically chosen by you. OB: The three places I have made films, are very different places, very different cities. It was very interesting to have Rome – Europe, Las Vegas – North America, Shanghai – the east; the three places reinvent the concept of a city. SH: The six images chosen to complete the show have a strong sense of the place they depict but are not explicitly of that place. They relate to one another, but they also stand alone, as can the films. You seem to want to show us the world we know in a new and fresh way, from which we can learn and discern things, to shift our desire to see the famous or celebrated. OB: It is a confrontation of all the concepts and ideas that we have, from the media, from the culture and iconography of the world. It corresponds to something real and if there is something else, it is in between. It can be a famous building seen in a different way, or to discover something that is very close to an important place that you do not know, or something very similar in places far apart. There is high and low culture, although I don’t agree with this division, so I’m curious to question it. Things are more confused. SH: We understand things differently from culture to culture, or at least have some sense of the constant shifts between them. It’s that shift that allows a person to look in a detached way at things, to make assessments and judgments. OB: It is also the shape. The shape is what we know, what we see and what we can understand, but it is only a shape. Maybe the real thing to understand is how the shape corresponds, the iconography corresponds, to something real not because it is real for the understanding. Why, on what, and how many – the quantity is important, to understand the bigness of something – because to change the point of view is to change the perception. Maybe my work is not about iconography or representation, before everything was about perception. The way we perceive something is very important, because after we see it we try and understand it, but without a careful perception it is too easy to see what is normal.

NATUR SERE

RAL ENITY ANSEL ADAMS

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B&W Landscape Photography

An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty. His relatively elderly parents, affluent family history, and the live-in presence of his mother’s maiden sister and aged father all combined to create an environment that was decidedly Victorian and both socially and emotionally conservative. Adams’s mother spent much of her time brooding and fretting over her husband’s inability to restore the Adams fortune, leaving an ambivalent imprint on her son. Charles Adams, on the other hand, deeply and patiently influenced, encouraged, and supported his son. Natural shyness and a certain intensity of genius, coupled with the dramatically “earthquaked” nose, caused Adams to have problems fitting in at school. In later life he noted that he might have been diagnosed as hyperactive. There is also the distinct possibility that he may have suffered from dyslexia. He was not successful in the various schools to which his parents sent him; consequently, his father and aunt tutored him at home. Ultimately, he managed to earn what he termed a “legitimizing diploma” from the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School — perhaps equivalent to having completed the eighth grade. The most important result of Adams’s somewhat solitary and unmistakably different childhood was the joy that he found in nature, as evidenced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden

Gate. Nearly every day found him hiking the dunes or meandering along Lobos Creek, down to Baker Beach, or out to the very edge of the American continent. When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Soon he was taking lessons, and the ardent pursuit of music became his substitute for formal schooling. For the next dozen years the piano was Adams’s primary occupation and, by 1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography. If Adams’s love of nature was nurtured in the Golden Gate, his life was, in his words, “colored and modulated by the great earth gesture” of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as “keeper” of the club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge. He became friends with many of the club’s leaders, who were founders of America’s nascent conservation movement. He met his wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The couple had two children. Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. Weston and Strand frequently consulted him for technical advice. He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns. Adams developed the famous and highly complex

Yosemite, Ansel Adams

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Adam’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal.

Jeffery Pine, Sentinal Dome, Ansel Adams

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The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, WY 1942, Ansel Adams

Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, 1942, Ansel Adams

Yosemite Valley, Summer, California, C. 1935, Ansel Adams

Maroon Bells, Snowmass Wilderness, CO 1951, Ansel Adams

“zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization. He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject. Adams’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal. He often labored for eighteen or more hours per day, for days and weeks on end. There were no vacations, no holidays, no Sundays in Ansel Adams’s life. Frequently, after and intense period of work, he would return to San Francisco or Yosemite, promptly contract the “flu,” and spend several days in bed. His hyper-kinetic existence was also fueled by alcohol, for which he had a particular fondness, and a constant whirl of social activity, friends, and colleagues. As Beaumont Newhall writes in his FOCUS: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (1993), “Ansel was a great party man and loved to entertain. He had a very dominating personality, and would always be the center of attention” (p. 235). Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. However, his great influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His black-and-white images were not “realistic” documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing. For Adams, the environmental issues of particular importance were

Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness. He focused on what he termed the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted the Park Service’s “resortism,” which had led to the over development of the national parks and their domination by private concessionaires. But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions and sea otters, and for clean air and water. An advocate of balanced, restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental mendacity and shortsightedness. Yet he invariably treated his opponents with respect and courtesy. Though wilderness and the environment were his grand passions, photography was his calling, his metier, his raison d’etre. Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental purposes. On 12 April 1977 he wrote to his publisher, Tim Hill, “I know I shall be castigated by a large group of people today, but I was trained to assume that art related to the elusive quality of beauty and that the purpose of art was concerned with the elevation of the spirit (horrible Victorian notion!!)” Adams was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of “humanity” in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that “the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees” (quoted by Adams, Oral History, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, p. 498). Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists. On the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been preserved for all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues.

Train Tracks Graffiti, Ansel Adams

Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography. Adams always claimed he was not “influenced,” but, consciously or unconsciously, he was firmly in the tradition of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Carlton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge. And he was the direct philosophical heir of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. He grew up in a time and place where his zeitgeist was formed by the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and “muscular” Americanism, by the pervading sense of manifest destiny, and the notion that European civilization was being reinvented — much for the better — in the new nation and, particularly, in the new West. Adams died in Monterey, California. Adams’s subject matter, the magnificent natural beauty of the West, was absolutely, unmistakably American, and his chosen instrument, the camera, was a quintessential artifact of the twentieth-century culture. He was blessed with an unusually generous, charismatic personality, and his great faith in people and human nature was amply rewarded. Adams channeled his energies in ways that served his fellow citizens, personified in his lifelong effort to preserve the American wilderness. Above all, Adams’s philosophy and optimism struck a chord in the national phsyche. More than any other influential American of his epoch, Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment.

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COLOPHON Thru The Lens Magazine was designed by Grayson Brucato for Typographic Systems, 2017. All of the images and text were sourced from publications and the internet and are only being used for design education purposes. Fonts: Helvetica, Baskerville. Printed at Jayhawk Ink, Lawrence, KS.

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