Word: worke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Adams has never repudiated his commercial photography. Like his teaching, or the extensive researches that led to his invention of the "zone" system of exposure calculation, or his 30-year association with the Polaroid Corp., commercial work helped him perfect his craft. And craft is central to Adams' achievement. The negative is the score," he likes to say. "The print is the performance...
...world, its colors, its erratic tones and shifting values, into a precisely tuned structure of differing grays. Some of his color photographs are beautiful. But they do not have the sense of a convention transformed and upheld that animates his black-and-white prints. The "feel" of Adams' monochrome work is utterly distinctive. It conveys an intense reverence for material: the density and solidity of rocks, the cannonball moon floating in a dark-filtered sky over Half Dome or the New Mexico desert, the way a geyser's spume becomes solid, a thick blade of water. There is an extraordinary...
...Yosemite Valley.) The show enables one to see Adams' early and late prints from the same negative, and the difference is interesting. The early ones are of ravishing delicacy; they have a 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...
Consider the market history of the late Paul Strand's work. Fifteen years ago, his platinum prints sold for $125. In 1972 they were still a bargain at $1,500. Today a good Strand...
Similar stories of steep appreciation can be told about the work of almost every other major 20th century photographer: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Diane Arbus and Imogen Cunningham, among the dead; Harry Callahan, Frederick Sommer, Paul Caponigro, and Fashion Photographers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, among the living. The great pictures of the 19th century are more expensive still. Last May two albums containing 100 early California and Oregon scenes by Carleton E. Watkins were sold for $198,000. "A print is amusing at $100," quips one art dealer...