Last week I wrote about the Ansel Adams in our TimeExhibit, Boston Museum of Fine Arts. That is now over, but you still have a chance to see the fantastic show that ran in parallel to it … Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico.  I will admit that I wasn’t familiar with Iturbide’s work and had not even heard of her before seeing this wonderful exhibit. Turns out that she is considered by many that do know about her to be Latin America’s premier photographer.

Again, so much to see and learn, so little time!

To say that the show was a surprise and a thrill would be an understatement! The highlights for me were her wonderful black and white environmental portraits and street scenes of daily Mexican life made with 35mm and medium format cameras.  Particularly special were the pictures she made at Mexican fiestas.

In an interview with The Guardian published on February 23^rdIturbide says “The camera for me is a pretext for exploring life and culture around the world, and what usually guides me is what surprises me as I look at things,” she says. “If I am not surprised, I cannot take photographs, because it is missing that emotional dimension.”

Her photographs are all surprising.  The show runs through May 12^th. Highly recommended and well worth the visit!

A couple of weeks ago I found out about this exhibit and quickly realized I needed to get to Boston before it closed. When I checked out the Musuem’s website I saw there was another exhibit running in parallel, Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico. Then I learned of another intriguing show, Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs, at the Andover Gallery of American Art located about forty minutes away on the campus of the Phillips Academy.

What does one do armed with such information? Two words … Road Trip!  Got up before way before the crack of dawn and was on my way before 6am.  Three exhibits and almost seven hundred miles later I pulled back into my driveway that evening at 10:30pm.   A lot of driving, but thankfully I had some great music to listen to and a lot of folks to catch up with on the cell!

I want to focus on the Ansel Adams in our Timeexhibit for now and will cover the other two shows in subsequent entries.

For many the question is how many times do you need to see an Ansel Adams show? I’ve seen several, including the famous retrospective at the National Gallery Art in Washington, DC.  The answer for me is whenever the opportunity presents itself!

I have also visited the Wilderness Society’s Washington DC headquarters several times and viewed Adams’ incredible Museum Set. Can you imagine sitting at your desk or walking through the office and looking up only to see Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico staring back at you!  I also was lucky enough to visit the Master’s home during a workshop with John Sexton and saw many wonderful images there.

So let’s get to it. The exhibit primarily included works by Adams, many familiar and a number no so much. It also included pictures by other great photographers that came before him, such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Frank Jay Haynes, as well as others that have followed him such as Mark Klett and Lois Conner.

The pictures by the pioneering photographers were very interesting, but to be honest with you, much of the newer work left me cold.  To say I am tired of gimmicky collages and boring large color photographs is an understatement.  Ok, now that I got that quickly out of the way, let’s focus on Adams!

An eye opener for me was that many of the prints, including some very famous ones, were small in size.  I mean about 8×10 or less!  Generally, we are used to seeing Adams prints much larger in size.  If there is anyone that can routinely pull that off it is Adams, as much of his work is truly majestic.  You are used to seeing 16×20, 20×24 and even larger prints, but these smaller ones were incredible little jewels!!  They’re truly amazing and force you to look closely to explore their detail and discover their hidden secrets!

Here are my highlights in particular order taken from my next to nearly illegible notes I scribbled down.

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome 

Clearing Winter Storm– an 8×10 version that was deeply selenium toned, as well as a much larger print without the toning effect

Moon and Half Dome

Adams first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras – 15 exquisite 8×10 prints includingMonolith, The Face of Half Dome

A number of small images I had never seen before in the flesh or in print, including several beauties from Adams’ “Shipwreck Series”, photographs made in 1932 of rusty metal and rocks found on the beach.  Others included Indian Mortar Holes, Big Meadow, Yosemite National Park; and Leaves in Pool, Sierra Nevada, California

Other wonderful small prints of street and nearby scenes I had never seen before – Cigar Store Indian, Powell Street, San Francisco; Political Sign and Circus Poster, San Francisco;  and Laurel Hill Cemetery, San Francisco

Golden Gate Before the Bridge 

White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona accompanied by a very similar earlier photograph previously made by Timothy O’Sullivan 

Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico

Georgia O’Keefe and Orville Cox

The Enchanted Mesa, near Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico 

Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Alaska

The Tetons and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park

Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California

Sand Dunes Sunrise, Death Valley National Monument

Grass and Burnt Stump, Sierra Nevada, California

And finally, a fantastic picture of graffiti I had never seen before– Wall Writing, Hornitos, California

Enough said. The exhibit closes in less than a week.  If you are even remotely close to Boston you must GO SEE IT!

I finally got around to calling Freestyle just before they closed on this past Monday.  Good news … they were going to be getting in more of the 100 sheet boxes of Fomabrom Variant III VC FB 8×10. Sigh of relief.  But then I decided to ask how many boxes they were actually going to be getting. Eight total and two were already spoken for. Well if I were flush with cash I would have taken the remaining six boxes. Instead I ordered three.

So I am good for a while, but I do worry about how spotty it might be to obtain some of the more boutique papers when you need them on a moments notice. Ilford – no problem. Fomabrom – maybe another story.

My recommendation is to make sure you always have enough critical materials on hand, be it paper, film or chemicals. You don’t want to see the dreaded words “out of stock” next to your tried and trues, especially if they are sourced from small overseas manufacturers.  The best plan is to keep your stocks up to date in order to avoid bad surprises.

The paper arrived on Saturday and went in the freezer.  All is well in my world … for now.

I am hoping that this is the final installment of the saga concerning my trials and tribulations with this paper and its twin Fomabrom Variant III.  So is Arista EDU Ultra the evil twin.  Sadly, in my experience, the answer is yes.  Over the recent holiday week I finished my Arista paper and went through an entire new box of Fomabrom.  And the results … the same icky molting of emulsion on the Arista paper’s edges with several prints during the hypo and selenium toning steps. And sure enough, again one print was ruined as the pealing went into the image itself!

How about the Fomabrom? One hundred sheets and not one bit of cosmic debris (for you Frank Zappa fans) floating in my trays from the final ones that made it to the toning process. So I guess that settles it for now. Both are incredibly fine papers that enable magical prints. And both cost $99.95 for a box of 100 8×10 sheets.  Seems like a simple decision. I will be using Fomabrom Variant III exclusively going forward … or will I?

I just checked on the Freestyle website to confirm pricing and noticed that both the 25 and 100 8×10 sheet boxes are “out of stock” and other Fomabrom papers are mostly listed as “out of stock” or in “low stock”. #$@%^$#%^&!  The Arista paper appears to be in stock, but I’ve been to this rodeo a few too many times and I hope this isn’t a replay of those experiences.

Stay tuned.

I am not a complete Fred Picker fan boy, but I am not shy about saying that he had some important and insightful things to say (not to mention some very fine photographs he made photographic and many innovations he introduced). Recently I’ve been discussing my hit rate for 2018. I was going through my stash of Fred’s Zone VI Newsletters and found some of his thoughts that were highly germane to mine on keeper hit rates.  While he focuses part of his discussion on large format work, what he says is relevant to whatever format you may use. I really don’t think I could say it better then Fred did, so I will just go ahead and quote him! I’m sure if he was still with us he wouldn’t mind!

From Newsletter #47, June, 1986, pp. 8-10:

“I just finished filling work from 1985 and generated some statistics I found interesting.  I photographed 120 das last year of which about twenty were spent on commercial assignments and 100 were spent on personal work. I exposed 456 large format personal negatives (about 300 4×5, 150 8×10) or 4.5 exposures for every day I photographed. Some of the negatives were duplicates made either for backup or with different filters, different exposures, under changing light conditions, or made for different developing treatment, etc. There were about 300 subjects photographed. After proofing, I chose thirty-one negatives to print. That’s one negative printed for every fifteen negatives made, one negative printed for every ten subjects photographed, one negative printed for every three days in the field.

Because it took an average of three working days – twenty-four hours – to make a photograph that I thought worth printing and it takes me about two-and-a-half hours to print a new negative, I spent ten times as long making a picture that I thought worth printing than I spent printing it.

When you add to the printing time, holder cleaning, film loading, chemical mixing, negative developing, proofing, washing, toning, mounting, filling, cleaning up the darkroom, etc.; it comes to probably 35 hours or a five day work week per printable negative. The percentage is worse than that. Ten of the thirty-one prints were consumed during the traditional, painful, but necessary “New Years Day Edit by Wood Stove.”

Edward Weston said that if at the top of his form and if given adequate subject matter, (tow hefty “ifs”) he thought he could make one significant photograph for every day he spent in the field. Ansel said that twelve serious photographs a year was good output. To the hobbyist who fires off two 36 exposure rolls on a Sunday morning and prints half of them between cocktails and bed time on Tuesday night, his level of production will seem like pretty slime pickings. It all depends on what the individual photographer thinks is worth printing.”

And From Newsletter #51, June, 1987, pp. 9-10:

“There is an aspect of the Zone System that is usually regarded as vital. It has to do with the previsualizing of the print in all aspects. In my opinion, no one really can. Certainly anyone can visualize the print in shades of grapy and an accomplished photographer can note the most insignificant details of the composition but no one knowsat the time of t exposure the answer to the only important question: did he merely skillfully record what was there (made an admirable picture) or will he see in the print that subtle and evasive something wonderful?

Consider: any thousands of unprinted negatives indicate that anyone’s ability to visualize at the time of exposure in the most sophisticated terms, the emotional content of the future print, is pretty crude. If we could really do it, how come you, me, and the greatest photographers in history, take so many pictures that excite us at the time of exposure but the prints contain no more emotional wallop than a postcard? Even though the great get a higher percentage of “keepers” than ordinary folks, they also get a lot of near misses. The truth is that the balance and complexity of ingredients that make up and extraordinary photograph are so ephemeral they can be “previsualized” only up to a point. The transformation of real objects onto a two dimensional plane, rendering their colors in black and white, and radically changing the subjects’ size make it extremely difficult to foretell the emotional power, if any, the print will contain. So often the most exciting moments in the filed are disappointments in the darkroom. But sometimes you just know. Strand made about nine negatives of the wondrous cobweb in Maine. He knew.

What can you do? You have no choice but to be tough on yourself. Do a lot of work. Do it the absolute best you can regardless of the difficulties you may find. Photograph only what excites you (never what you think will “make a good picture”) and hope that the law of averages is operating.”

Take some time and think about what Fred said. Then go out and make some great photographs and prints you will be proud of!

Awhile back I wrote about not getting around to printing. I started thinking about it again because I sense there are a lot of folks out there who have darkrooms or access to them, but don’t print very much or just don’t print at all. Soon they are drawn by the allure of digital. So much easier and the gratification is almost in real time. You can figure out what you want to do in Photoshop then print the thing during the commercial break while watching television. Someone actually told me they’ve done that!

There always seems to be lots of excuses. Let’s face it – good craft is hard and time consuming. Well football season is almost over, so how about it?

I previously said that assuming you at least get your film developed; make sure to do your proof sheets in order to determine whether there is anything worth printing!  You don’t have to print right away.  Some people wait a certain amount of time and then print only what they consider the very best of what they have accomplished.  That’s pretty much what I do and what I’m in the process of doing now. Over the holidays I printed nine new images from 2018, but I have more to go. Then there are all the others I want to print from previous years that I have now decided to do after giving them another look. It’s a lot of work. But isn’t that what this is all about?  Why go out there in the first place and make photographs if you are never going to print them and bring your vision to fruition?

It doesn’t matter what your way of doing things is.  Just make sure you print.

Here’s my recommendation – if you have dropped out of the game for a while don’t put so much pressure on your self. Instead, take a deep breath, relax and do the following:

1. Photograph – try using one camera with one lens for awhile (e.g., a 50mm or its equivalent depending on the format)
2. Develop your negatives
3. Make proof sheets
4. Spend some real quality time examining them; be ruthless and determine which images are the truekeepers
5. Decide which picture you like best
6. Set aside some time from your busy schedule and only make a print from one negative; give it your best effort, taking as long as necessary to do what you have to do in order to say what you want to say
7. Mount your print and spot tone
8. Examine the results over some time to determine whether the print is good as is, needs further tweaking, or isn’t really that good after all
9. Reprint if necessary or move on to another negative if need be

Now if you have done all of this you will have accomplished what few are willing to do in today’s world – that is taking the time and making the effort to do the best possible job you can to see something through to its logical conclusion … instead of taking the easy way out by not doing anything at all, or just giving up and going digital.

Just get the first print completed to your satisfaction. Then how about putting a nice overmat on it and framing it. Now you can find a place on your wall and admire your achievement!

You are now ready to make more prints of your best negatives – and you will want to find the time to do it!  You may even be motivated to get out and make more photographs! You’re on your way. One negative and one print at a time.  No rush and no pressure to print a certain number of images. Remember – a small number of truly great images in one year really is really productive.

Don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise.

A while back I wrote an entry called Revisiting Your Proof Sheets … What You Find Might Surprise You!  A couple of years ago I decided to take a look through my many proof sheets going all the way back to the beginning and found that there might be some gems that I missed for some reason.  I wrote that I found around a hundred or so images that looked like they deserved a chance to be printed and prove themselves. I said that I would be slowly going through the many flagged proof sheets and printing in between current work.  I knew that it would take a long time, but I was excited by prospects! Even though I haven’t done as much as I would like to I am still excited and have dedicated myself to doing much more this year and beyond.

The question in the earlier piece was why was it that so many images I revisited somehow now looked more appealing than they did at first glance?  I wasn’t sure.  Perhaps a different perspective, a new point of view, or the fact that I am older and hopefully somewhat wiser.  Or maybe I was too hasty the first time around.

I recently pulled out the excellent bookContact: Theorypublished by Ralph Gibson’s Lustrum Press (review to come) that contains proof sheets of number of well-known photographers, descriptive essays by the photographers, and the images they chose for printing.  One thing I noticed was the many near and not so near misses on their proof sheets. Not surprising at all (see last week’s entry).

The essay by the late great Mary Ellen Mark was particularly insightful concerning the topic of discussion and goes along way to answering my question:

“In reviewing this contact sheet I just re-noticed frame 24A—I think I’m going to make to print of it. This sometimes happens when you stay away from your contacts for a long time (I have not edited this sheet for three years).  You will often go back and find very good pictures that you missed before – I think often the distance of both emotions and time can give you a fresh perspective on your contact sheets.”

Great thinking by a wonderful photographer!  Thank you so much Mary Ellen – I think you nailed it!

So dust off those old proof sheets this year and take a fresh look at them. You may find some overlooked gems!