Matt BlazeJan 7, 2025

#photography nerditry:

In 1943, Ansel Adams (with camera) was granted access to the Manzanar Japanese-American internment camp to document the people held there. While Adams was not quite as a great a portrait or documentary photographer as he was at capturing the American landscape, he gave his subjects rich humanity and life.

He subsequently donated both his original negatives as well as some prints to the Library of Congress, without restriction. You can see them at
https://www.loc.gov/collections/ansel-adams-manzanar/about-this-collection/

About this Collection | Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), America's most well-known photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese-Americans interned there during World War II. For the first time, digital scans of both Adams's original negatives and his photographic prints appear side by side allowing viewers to see Adams's darkroom technique, in particular, how he cropped his prints. Adams's Manzanar work is a departure from his signature style landscape photography. Although a majority of the more than 200 photographs are portraits, the images also include views of daily life, agricultural scenes, and sports and leisure activities (see Collection Highlights). When offering the collection to the Library in 1965, Adams said in a letter, "The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment....All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use." The web site also includes digital images of the first edition of Born Free and Equal, Adams's publication based on his work at Manzanar.

The Library of Congress
Show threadMatt BlazeJan 7, 2025
This is an extraordinary collection, not just for the extraordinary subject material, but because for many of the images we have access to both Adams' final result (scans of his prints) as well as "straight" scans from the negatives. It shows how utterly essential darkroom post-processing can be to the final impact of a fine art photograph. And now you can download the scans and see what you can do with them yourself in, eg, Photoshop or Capture One.
Show threadMatt BlazeJan 7, 2025

Consider this image, a simple composition of birds on a power line.

Here's a straight scan from the negative:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppprs.00162/

And here's what Adams did with it:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppprs.00291/

Birds on wire, evening, Manzanar Relocation Center / photograph by Ansel Adams.

1 photographic print : gelatin silver. | 1 negative : nitrate. | Birds sit on power lines above buildings, mountains and setting sun in the background.

The Library of Congress
Show threadMatt Blaze
So next time someone tells you you're "cheating" if you make adjustments in post processing, tell them to go pound sand.
Jan 7, 2025 at 7:47pmWeb
Show threadMatt BlazeJan 7, 2025

It's also instructive to compare Adams' work from Manzanar with that of another great 20th century photographer who was granted access: Dorothea Lange.

Adams took a superficially upbeat approach, portraying his subjects as highly relatable, ordinary Americans making the best of things under somewhat difficult circumstances.

Lange showed them more as victims, emphasizing the rough conditions and fundamental injustice: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/dorothea-lange-39-s-visit-to-the-japanese-internment-camps/fwVR8MHEGsn72g?hl=en

Both were subversive, though in different ways.

The photographer captured this unprecedented moment in WWII

The photographer captured this unprecedented moment in WWII

Google Arts & Culture
Show threadMatt BlazeJan 7, 2025

Lange was first and foremost a documentarian who saw herself as an activist. Her most famous work was done for the US Farm Services Administration during the depression (e.g., her iconic "Migrant Mother" portrait). She sought to use photography to expose injustice and improve the world.

Adams, on the other hand, saw himself first and foremost as an artist. He sought to elevate photography as an art form.

(They were close, with deep mutual respect.)

Show threadMatt BlazeJan 7, 2025
This is, of course, an oversimplification. Lange was an obvious master of formal composition as well as the technical craft of photography, and Adams, who served for decades on the board of the Sierra Club, fully understood the power of photography to influence public and political opinion. But the two approached their artistic practice from very different perspectives.
Show threadSteve BellovinJan 7, 2025
@mattblaze To quote one of my instructors, we're image makers, not image takers.
Show threadDarrin WestJan 7, 2025
@SteveBellovin @mattblaze I’ve heard the same about comedians. You hear people say “make a joke”. Indeed they do. Getting the timing, setup, all that. It’s not just an off the cuff quip (while it might appear that way to the audience). Other than improv, I suppose. There’s work involved.
Show threadSteve BellovinJan 7, 2025
@obviousdwest @mattblaze Yup. A former faculty colleague of mine also does stand-up comedy, and she puts a *lot* of effort into figuring out *exactly* how to tell a joke.
Show threadMatt BlazeJan 7, 2025
@obviousdwest @SteveBellovin Improv, too (maybe especially).
Show threadAdam Shostack  Jan 7, 2025
@mattblaze If only Ansel Adams had written a fourth book, “the ignorant critic” to augment the Camera, the Negative and the Print
Show threadDaniel BlakeJan 8, 2025
@mattblaze “tell them to go pound sand”. On Arrakis.
Show threadÖlbaumJan 11, 2025

@mattblaze To be fair, I discovered very late that you could do all this post-processing with negatives (and it really helped understand their weird icons of some tools in Photoshop 😄,) and I’m probably not the only one.

I remember seeing a picture from a famous photographer with his processing notes in top of it. I can’t remember the photographer’s name, only that the subject was a person walking in the street. I wish I could find that again so I can save it in a safe place and lose it again.