Ansel Adams on planning

The universal (adamic…) seed has grown into a jungle-like diversity. We’re so busy cutting our way through so many different knowledge branches, leaves and fruits (confusing, too: sometimes the mere existence of one contradicts the other one’s reality), we don’t even see the trunk any longer. Our common nature as human beings gets more irrelevant and abstract as we climb higher in the tree of specialization. We became doctors, plumbers, writers. The taste of progress, frequently professionalizing playful curiosity into sheer differentiation logic, lured us to ever more specialized and innovative heights, where some of us got to hold fashionably intricate job titles.

Eager practitioners and aspiring authorities faced with fickle flows of specialized literature are naturally expected to unwaveringly start – and never quite stop – chomping through theories, newly coined terms and an array of all-encompassing schemes, with little productive time to be lost delving into sideway glitters. And with the number of experts spiraling democratically, there’s no shortage of potential intake.

So, whatever knowledge bubble we make a living in, we’re encircled by specialists -- and that’s allright. But if only emanated by them, specialized air would soon become irrespirable. Fortunately there are also the Poets. Nothing to do with versification, although there are poets that are Poets as well. The latter are universal specialists: people with all kinds of professions get inspired by Poets, because these open in us the valves through which the sap of the tree we all lived in, but forgot about, can run again.

While leafing through a book on photographic techniques, I recognized something in Ansel Adam’s pictures and words scattered among an author’s advice on cameras, exposure or printing. And while it may well read “photography”, to me Ansel Adams talks about brands, planning and advertising – as they could be.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.
A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed, and is, thereby, a true manifestation of what one feels about life in its entirety.

We observe few objects really closely. As we walk on the earth, we observe the external events at two or three arms’ length. If we ride a horse or drive in an automobile, we are further separated from the immediate surround. We see and photograph “scenery”; our vast world is inadequately described as the “landscape”. The most intimate object perceived daily is usually the printed page. The small and commonplace are rarely explored.

The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automatic robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with.

Art takes wing from the platform of reality. We observe reality; we may or may not feel anything about it. If we do feel something, we may have a moment of recognition of the imperative subject and its qualities in terms of a photograph. In a sense this is a mystical experience, a revelation of the world that transcends fact and reaches into the spirit.

I am interested in why I see certain events in the world around me that others do not see. On the day that this photograph [Frozen Lake and Cliffs] was made there were several other photographs nearby, some very good ones who were then far more technically advanced than I. The scene was before us all, but no one else responded with creative interest. Cedric Wright, close friend, violinist, and photographer from Berkeley, observed what I was doing and, half in jest, set his camera up in my location. I saw his print later; he did not have a lens of appropriate focal length and he overexposed his negative. On seeing my print he exclaimed, “Jezz! Why didn’t I see that!” […]
With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable. The visualization is complete, a seemingly instant review of all the mental and imaginative resources called forth by some miracle of the mind-computer that we do not comprehend. For me this resource is not of things consciously seen or transcription of musical recollections; it is, perhaps, a summation of total experience and instinct. Nothing modifies or replaces it.

My own approach relies on experience and intuition for the visualization of the image, but I prefer a more methodical system for executing the visualized photograph.

I am not a scientist. I consider myself an artist who employs certain techniques to free my vision.

Printing is both a carrying-to-completion of the visualized image and a fresh creative activity in itself. As with other creative processes, understanding craft and controlling the materials are vital to the quality of the final result.
You will find it a continuing delight to watch prints emerge in the developer and see that your original visualization has been realized, or in many cases enhanced by subtle variations in value.

I believe in people, in the simpler aspects of human life, in the relation of man to nature. I believe man must be free, both in spirit and in society, that he must build strength into himself, affirming the enormous beauty of the world and acquiring the confidence to see and to express his vision. And I believe in photography as one means of expressing this affirmation and of achieving an ultimate happiness and faith.