William Mortensen!

[summaron]

I was thinking of how Evans often brings things to the edge of the frame and off, like an over packed suitcase. Cartier-Bresson's framing suggests an offspace where other things are happening we can't see. My understanding of Evans from his bio is he wasn't sentimental about the subject matter, even in his Cuban photographs - just curious about the way things looked - and about old Americana and odd placements of things. Agee was the person who managed the sentimentality.

 

[MichaelW]

Ultimately though, for all the griping of Adams and f/64, it turns out that Mortensen was the true modernist all along, not them

Now there's some shoddy journalism.

 

[Mark C]

It is curious that you decide Walker Evans uses dynamic framing and lack of sentimental subject matter, considering the bulk of his really important work was for the FSA and about the sentimental loss of a way of life accentuated by a dispassionate framing style. Walker Evans was a political photographer, his images made to get across a message. I mean, James Agee and Steinbeck weren't feeding on and reciprocating in everything Bresson or Adams did in quite the same way (or at all), nor any other 'intellectuals' in the same period.

V

It is easy to be confused by Evans' work for the RA and FSA. What you are saying might be true for most of the photographers there, but was not for Evans. He had no interest in the politics or propaganda role of the photographs. The job gave him a salary, travel expenses, camera equipment (he ordered up a new Deardorff 8x10 with Zeiss Protar VII), and film to do work he was interested in. He even made up a list before accepting of things he would and would not do, one line saying something like "absolutely no politics!". He made a minimal effort to fulfill the assignments given, but it was a constant battle of wills.

 

[Roger Hicks]

But Mortensen can't be considered a "pioneer of modern photography," as the article in the Guardian has it, because he doesn't apply any of the formal lessons of modernist photography that you see in Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and even Ansel Adams. His rather undynamic framing and his sentimental subject matter is similar to 19th century academic painting – Puvis de Chavannes and the Pre Raphaelites - and perhaps to the reactionary contemporary painter John Currin.

Paul Outerbridge, who uses some of the same type of subject matter as Mortensen, but with more bite and wit, I think is a much more interesting photographer, and has enjoyed a sort of revival since the 1980s.

James

Dear James,

But he does "apply" other things, including (as V12 points out) symbolism and an ingenious tension between realism and fantasy. With AA, there was no pretense that the fantasy was anything other than reality; and the only symbolism was the symbol representing itself. I really don't think you can dismiss him quite so cavalierly on quite such narrow criteria, though I agree that the Grauniad missed more than one point.

The idea of "the formal lessons of modernist photography" brings me out in hives, as being a hopelessly narrow viewpoint. Actually, "the formal lessons" suffices to make me itch.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Now there's some shoddy journalism.

Dear Michael,

Nah. Be fair. It's nothing to do with journalism. It's just ignorance of the subject, coupled with the belief held by many Guradian contributors in the excellence of their own own education and intelligence: a belief that is not invariably born out by a reading of what they actually write.

And, in all fairness, don't neglect the worth of simply shocking people. He may not have fully believed all that he wrote himself, but still have deemed it legitimate as a tool for applying his boot to the arse of the Anselites.

Cheers,

R.

 

[summaron]

Hello Roger,

Perhaps I am prejudiced by my own experiences. I once took some classes at a photography department set up by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind where we were shown examples of this sort of 19c century Pictorialism as bad art. So the Newhalls weren’t the only ones excluding Mortensen from the “canon”.

The “lessons” were a negative sort, more of what to leave out, of direct observation rather than an imposed sentimental narrative. (I didn’t mean to imply by “lessons” a stuffy set of rules.)

I appreciate your comment about fantasy and reality, but for me photography is about always the real, endlessly fascinating but never fantastic.

(Also I’m a terrible darkroom person, still occasionally get surge marks on my negatives, so Mortensen’s expertise there is rather lost on me.)

Here are two evaluation of M’s work from the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a fairly conservative institution. The second mentions how he was following Steichen’s use of “frank artiface” (which Evans and the modernists didn’t cotton to):

Human Relations [fingers in eyes]

Mortensen began his career as a Hollywood studio photographer, turning out glamour portraits of stars such as Clara Bow and Jean Harlow. In the early 1930s he established a photography school in Laguna Beach, where he refined and promoted his own aesthetic—an eccentric blend of late Pictorialism, Surrealism, and Hollywood kitsch. Restlessly inventive in the darkroom, he employed a wide variety of techniques, including combination printing, heavy retouching, and physical and chemical abrasion of the negative. At times, his use of textured printing screens gave his photographs the appearance of etchings or lithographs, as in this audaciously grotesque picture, which was prompted, according the artist, by an overcharged long-distance telephone bill.

Jean Harlow

By the time this photograph was made in the 1920s, Pictorialism--with its fuzzy contours and overt print manipulation--had fallen out of favor among avant-garde photographers, who insisted instead on "straight photography" as the purest expression of their medium. Mortensen, rejected by modernists as hopelessly retrograde, steadfastly practiced pictorialist techniques for the duration of his career, maintaining Steichen's position of twenty years earlier--that frank artifice in photographs was key to their success as works of art.
In this portrait of Jean Harlow, the starlet lolls in a timeless sphere of softened forms and abstracted space. For the Hollywood portrait, at least, Mortensen's idealizing approach had mass appeal.

James

 

[SyPat]

"a unique and innovative visual stylist"
"pioneer of modern photography,"
"he also had much in common – in technique, style and approach – with European outlier artists of the dadaist and surrealist movements."
"the last of the great pictorialist photographers"
"he was the true modernist all along"

Who are we talking about ? Is The Guardian serious ?

 

[kbg32]

William Mortensen Exhibition: American Grotesque at Stephen Romano Gallery (111 Front Street, Suite 208, DUMBO, Brooklyn) through November 30, 2014.

 

[CameraQuest]

Mortensen, one of the all time greats

especially worth visiting if you are not aware of his work and techniques

 

[charjohncarter]

I said it early in this thread: 'Edge of Darkness' by Thornton in the final chapter has an interesting method of taking a portrait that was inspired by Mortensen.

 

[Doug]

I did a paper on Mortensen, with illustrated examples, for a college photo class. As I recall it was generally positive but not convincing to the prof who did not like M's style.