Totally stunning.

Definitely not the "Daily Fail" today!

Wow, those are amazing. O'Sullivan sounds like a helluva guy, too. Wow.

These are great. Of late I've been looking at old stuff like this. Some of these are more interesting as historic documentation, but others are moments of really great photography. Looking at photographic history, we with our fancy digital cameras with lenses and photoshop, or hipstamatic, don't hold a candle to these.

eekacat: I agree. So much. And you're right, richat, I'd never heard of O'Sullivan before and he sounds like an amazing person. I love the fact that he'd photograph native people wearing modern dress (for the time) instead of asking them to put on their traditional clothes. To me, that makes him a photojournalist as well as an artist.

These are great!

Fantastic.

I love what a long exposure does to flowing water.

Absolutely astounding. Actually, in their execution they kind of seem to give the lie to the entire thesis of this Ansel Adams (as groundbreaker) show we're doing soon. But I'm not that sophisticated a looker, really. Really cool.

Miko, I thought of Ansel Adams too. O'Sullivan was working with some of the earliest cameras ever (in the U.S.) and was apparently REALLY gifted.

I love the fact that he'd photograph native people wearing modern dress (for the time) instead of asking them to put on their traditional clothes. To me, that makes him a photojournalist as well as an artist.

I also agree. Curtis' photos are great, but they're definitely "staged".

Miko, Ansel Adams truly was a groundbreaking photographer. If you only consider his technical skill in the darkroom, and as an originator of a unique way of looking at exposure (the zone system) then he is absolutely groundbreaking. There were other people during his time doing similar work, but Adams' still stands out. To me he is one of those people when you look at his work, you know it is his.

O'Sullivan was groundbreaking as well. Photography was a bit of a novelty when he did his work. His work belies his dual role as documentarian and artist. Photography was not considered an art form back then, but O'Sullivan composes his photographs with the painters eye. I'd be interested in knowing more about him and his background. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he had some formal training as a painter, or was somehow interested in painting and art.

I think where people lose sight of Ansel Adams as artist comes from his subject matter. Much of his more popular photographs tend to be subjects of pretty iconic views, or of things we've seen much of in western art. He was the first one to say that he wasn't a representational photographer, that his prints don't show a "real" view of his subjects. He was rather a painter of light and shadow, and his medium was the silver gelatin print. I think that when we see his prints, we tend to impose our own experience having seen the same vistas and views he photographed, and that's where I think we lose sight of his artistic talent, and where we lose sight of photography as art. Sure it's more subtle than someone who is doing more abstract photography, but it's still groundbreaking art just the same.

I think O'Sullivan is every bit the equal of Adams in terms of breaking new ground. They just happened to live in different eras, and honestly they might not have been so great if they had swapped places in time. They were the right people for their respective times. In the end, the photographs they made were done with the same great eye for composition. Adams was blessed to live at a time where he didn't have to be a documentarian or marketer of the west, but could make art for arts sake. O'Sullivan was blessed to be paid to be a photographer when it was considered a novelty, and not an art, but yet making art at the same time. I think there is room where both can coexist as artists, and groundbreakers at the same time.

O'Sullivan's work is a true time treasure.

Very Cool

Miko, Ansel Adams truly was a groundbreaking photographer. ...

Yeah, I've read about seven giant tomes on Adams and helped develop the interpretation of the show, so I have a decent handle on him. I'm talking about a subtlety of interpretation here. The thing I am noting is that much of what we are saying about his manipulation of the photographic plane to achieve so much sharpness through the entire depth of field over extreme distance, and also about his composition techniques and use of light and shadow, and how it illuminates his participation in Modernist photography projects as with the Group f/64, is, I think, open to examination in light of the characteristics of Sullivan's much earlier work. Yes, Adams was in open rebellion against the Pictorialists, but are we acknowledging these earlier antecdents enough? I'd imagine he knew a lot about them, passionate student of photography as he was. Especially since in several cases, he shot the same landscapes from quite similar angles and explored light in many similar ways.

The thesis of the show doesn't just talk about Adams being "groundbreaking" in general, which most people who know his work at all have some idea of (we're all going to be worn out on being asked to explain the zone system in short order) but doing so in very specific ways which we're saying drove new directions in photography, but which doseem to have been anticipated at least a bit, in the areas of clarity and contrast, in these photographs, much earlier. And the emphasis on Modernism intrigues me more now. This show actually does not include as many of the classic, overly familiar Sierra-Club-calendar monumental landscapes as it does highly abstracted, high-contrast pieces that are much more rarely seen. That tells the story of an Adams interested in pushing the camera as machine to make images that challenged the eye and called attention to geometry and light rather than subject matter depiction. But we carry the themes of Modernism from them into some of the landscapes, drawing parallels of technique where I wonder, having looking at these, we are perhaps overselling some of the Modernism story at least with some of those. The thesis may not hold as solidly throughout. We'll see when it all hangs together; at the very least, it's an interesting and provocative way to view Adams that is entirely different from the usual presentation of his work, so even if you walk away disagreeing with the proposition you've had something to think about, as I have here.

Sounds like an interesting show, Miko. It seems like you're approaching the photography as art end of things, and I hope people learn from it. I think sometimes it's hard to point out that something so representational can be abstract at the same time.

As far as the zone system, at least you just have to explain what it is, and don't have to teach people how to use it. It's really a pretty simple concept that can take a long time to understand in practice.

Oh yeah. It's an art museum, so we have a huge slant that way no matter what it is we're showing. And yes, that's true that we don't have to teach the use of the zone system, or of any large-format cameras, ourselves. I think what we're readying for is that it's one of those things people have heard about, even if they're not photographers, and want to have explained. And we're definitely doing a show on technique so there's a chance it can derail some of the tours and stuff to go too deeply into the "how" as opposed to the "what." But it's going to be a lot of fun.