Word: public
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hope of trapping their own Ansel Adams image, rather as tourists in 18th century Italy sometimes carried a smoked lens called a Claude Glass, through which the landscapes of the Roman Campagna could be seen in the mellow brown tone of Claude Lorrain's canvases. To that public, Adams is as American as John Wayne: the last portraitist of Western sublimity...
...public for fine photographic prints is growing, and prices are soaring (see box). But it can hardly be called a large audience. Most people are immersed in a daily stream of documentary photographs from newspapers, magazines and television. The purpose of these images is information; they are scanned, milked, passed over. From that documentary point of view there is something perverse and excessive in the very idea of paying thousands of dollars for a single photo, a sum which a decade ago would have brought home three or four moderately good Rembrandt etchings...
Today Adams spends far more time on the performance than on the score. He virtually stopped taking pictures for public consumption in 1965, and rarely lifts a lens outside Carmel any more. He can occasionally be seen roaming that photogenic seaside town, a Hasselblad camera in hand, but the images he snaps are put aside for his private collection. Instead of turning out new works, Adams devotes most of his working days to making prints of his earlier ones. He spends about four mornings a week in his darkroom and devotes the afternoons to updating the series of books...
...subtlety of discrimination, a continuity of surface tone that are essentially lyric. But by middle age, Adams' work began to shift. In the darkroom, he was conducting from the negative's score?pushing the image to its tonal limit, infusing it with a Wagnerian moodiness. The late prints are public declamations, cast in an epic mode. To Adams, change is simply a matter of knowing more. The later the print, in his eyes, the better. "I like my prints full of beans now," he says. "I guess I get more belligerent as I get older...
...coated plates in 1839. "Photography was art from the moment the first shutter clicked," insists Graham Nash, 37, a San Francisco musician (formerly of Crosby, Stills and Nash), who owns one of the largest private collections on the West Coast. But only in the past decade has the general public placed photography alongside the other major arts. The first commercially successful New York City gallery devoted solely to photographs was opened in 1969 by Lee Witkin, who is credited with helping start the boom. Only in the past two or three years have collectors been willing...