Nick and I went to the AGO this afternoon to catch the the end of the photo exhibit showing Ansel Adams’ collected works and some of Steiglietz’ photography. It was crowded with people rushing in before the show closes this weekend, and the photos were exciting enough that the din in the gallery drowned out the construction workers, painting and drilling on the other sides of the walls. Afterwards we went to the creperie and talked about the works, then talked about open marriages, and just talked. I’m looking around, always, far too needy for male attention for my own good. I am quickly becoming frighteningly too interested. The way I must have been when I was a teenager. Sigh. Must find a few other hobbies.
I love Nicky–his heart is so open and he’s so strong, and today I told him not to ever leave me because he’s one of the few real men in my life I would be lost without. And yet it was so difficult to ask for advice from him, give him a bit of trust (when he’s been such a trustworthy man). I’m afraid I’m the one not worthy of trust, I seem unable to shoulder someone’s trust and to my mind I can tell when I’ll have to abandon commitments. Its a big flaw, I’m afraid, yet I’m so terrified of the possibility whenever it might occur to me. Such a jackass.
So this was the official day of asking for advice from Nick, after the many years we’ve known one another, and I still have the feeling that things will change irrevocably after yesterday’s heart to heart.
But Nicky said, I have to trust. I have to take a few risks with people and trust them to participate with me (and stop feeling like I’ll just be ignored, or told to fuck off, or thought of as being completely nuts, which has happened). I have to trust people enough to just say what I think on occasion. So I’m going to have to tell M. flat out that I want to start seeing other lovers, and see if we can’t work something out between us to accommodate that.
As for what I think about Ansel Adams: he wanted to make icons out of ideas about reality, not give us reality in photographic images. Well, at least, not a reality we could even experience for longer than a second, and then it would still seem imaginary. I think he worked hard to make the mundane archetypal in his photos: a sunset over a small town (shot with a “mistake” lens, of course, a happy accident of timing, location, and error); a cloud over a mountain top; the ubiquitously rendered image of a rose, made that much more real, dimensional, powerful.
Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez
That must be the thing I’m responding to, in his work: his unwillingness to just look at the world around him as it exists, because he knew everyone just takes it for granted if it’s just left as it is. I can’t look at reality objectively and like it, either.
Stieglitz’s photos are all about the same thing, but the planning element is just that much further developed. I think he waited hours in place for just the right light; I know he looked for events he could use for their predictability.
Stieglitz’s
“Equivalent”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Adams’ Wood/Rose
Adams had something of an advantage in this area, simply by focusing primarily on nature photography. The manipulations were harder to detect. You’d hardly notice the fact that both the wood grain and the rose petal’s “veins” mimic each other in this image, and that they are the draw to your eyes, not the rose in itself. I never get the impression, looking at Adams’ work, that the images are just documents–they communicate clearly that he’s used some kind of filter in his shot, some kind of lens which would produce a heightened and altered image of what he saw with his eyes, in the developing process. The Moonrise photo was shot, infamously, with the “wrong” lens/filter on the camera, an impromptu photo taken “on the way home” from a shoot. The photo-altered light makes thy sky look luminous, the tombstones and houses phosphorescent after the image has been developed. Immediately after the shot was taken, the sun sank and Hernandez was in darkness–if the shot hadn’t been taken when it was, as it was, the image would have been lost.
Most people know about Stieglitz through his marriage to Georgia O’Keeffe, (I love that his first wife kicked him out after returning home to find him “photographing” Georgia), but he also had a very long artistic relationship with Adams. 
Stieglitz’s Barn: Lake George
He often showed Adams’ photos in his gallery and featured his works in magazines he edited and published. His goal was to make photography a recognized art form, and Adams’ goal was to make images which would become so iconic they’d play some role in preserving the wild lands he’d become so attached to. He saw them as endangered, and threatened, and knew they’d never survive without some effort on his part to make others see them as vital as well.
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