Moonrise at Age 7
An interesting tidbit that leads to an interesting point. According to this gallery webpage (scroll about half-way down the page), in the first seven years after Ansel Adams made the negative, there were less than 10 prints of the now-famous Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941 iconic image. Think about that for a minute …
- The potential importance of this image escaped Adams for years after he made it.
- The public/critics (assuming anyone saw it) didn't recognize its historic importance for a decade or more.
- Only after Adams learned how to print it (and after he intensified the negative in 1948) did the image become the familiar dramatic tonalities we all know today.
- Adams eventually made almost 900 copies of this image — about 1% of those in the first years after he made photographed it.
A few random thoughts:
- There is so much hullaballoo about so-called "vintage prints" — no doubt because they are rare, not necessarily because they are better. No image in the history of photography demonstrates this as well as this example. As artists, what is our goal — to make something rare, or to make something that's the best we can?
- I wonder how many of our images have the potential to be better than the version we made in the weeks (or years) right after we took the photograph? If Adams hadn't continued to work on Moonrise, think what we'd be missing! If we don't continue to work on some of our older images, what might we be missing?
- We live in an age where the zeitgeist is focused on the immediate. Yesterday's image is old news. Ask any photographer what work of theirs excites them the most and they will invariably say, "The work I'm doing now." Although that is thoroughly understandable, maybe there is some value is looking back and pulling old things forward.
- It's far too easy to forget that we are aging — or should I say, maturing artistically. Our work is a reflection of our process. If you would make a print today exactly like you made it 30 years ago, that might just be a clue about something in your maturing process that's worth thinking about. It could be that the old print was just perfect as it was. It might also be that you're stuck in the past.
- New techniques can change aesthetics. When Adams learned to selenium tone negatives to intensify them, it changed how he was capable of printing this image. (Perhaps he always knew how, I don't know for sure.) Clearly, the new techniques we have at our disposal today have the potential to change the way we think about images we made back when. Here is an example of that in my life — an image I was not only able to repair, but one that I could finesse more easily in Photoshop to get just the right delicate highlight tonalities I wanted.
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