ESFotoClix Blog

As I mentioned in a previous installment on the book “Ansel Adams in Color,” Adams’ reservations regarding color photography hinged a great deal on his view of how a photo portrays reality. His view on realism is perhaps best represented by his statement that “as photography approaches the simulation of reality it withdraws from the esthetic experience of reality.” He goes on to clarify he means this in the artistic license sense and exempts work whose aim is to remain documentary faithful.

With his view of reality in photography I think we can be assured that Ansel Adams did not mean he felt free to turn a Yosemite landscape into one of the surface of Mars. He understood his art remained connected with reality, though not necessarily aiming to distort it beyond recognition. Part of what disturbed him about some color photography work he saw was the tendency to make it better by making it redder, to pump color volume beyond the real to overcome a photograph’s lack of impact. Adams saw his photographs as representations and interpretations of reality, but not void of it. After all, without reality, what is there to represent or interpret?

When it came to “realism” as it relates to color photography, Ansel Adams also pointed out what many of us have noticed when adjusting white balance on our newer digital camera photos: we often are going by memory of what the scene actually looked like, anyway. Isn’t that an interpretive exercise? More pronounced an objection, however, Adams pointed out the greater reluctance to depart from literal representation of reality when one views a color photograph. Since we experience the world in living color, viewers will give a B&W photograph the benefit of the doubt without faulting it for being “unrealistic” or “cooked.” Modify colors in a photograph beyond certain expectations, and some may turn it off as “garish” (Adams’ own word) or “overcooked.” As he put it:

“In thinking about the ‘accuracy’ of color photography, we should review the characteristics of photography in general in terms of representation and interpretation. Black-and-white photography is accepted as a stylized medium; values are intentionally accented or subdued in reference to their ‘photometric-equivalent’ value. There is little or no ‘reality’ in the blacks, grays and whites of either the informational or expressive black-and-white image, and yet we have learned to interpret these values as meaningful and ‘real.’”

For me this and other thoughts Adams expressed about color ring true. As I have been experimenting with B&W through digital techniques, I too have slowly discovered a greater sense of freedom to achieve a particular purpose. At times I have seen myself departing from reality by a greater extent than I would be comfortable with in color. However, I have also struggled with locating and maintaining the line of tension where reality and its interpretation connect. As much latitude as B&W conversions may give me, were I to choose the “wrong” channel mix to render African-American skin tones as light and Caucasian skin tones as dark, it is unclear as to whether such a rendition would be effective or accepted. One can conceive where such an interpretation might be desirable, as for instance when wanting to portray racial or color blindness. In general, however, if I were the viewer of such an image, I would find it distracting.

I have Adams to thank for helping me sort out the meaning of what some term as “actuality,” a sense that though manipulated or void of color, an image retains some sort of equivalency with the actual scene even if it does not maintain literal accuracy.