The Online Photographer

Sorting out what and who you like in art is a lifelong process, probably. The key is to engage with who engages you when they touch you. Even if the touch is transient and you yourself move on with the years.

I can give a couple of examples from my own past. When I was young (a teenager) I read The Red Pony and was deeply affected by it, and I hero-worshipped John Steinbeck to the point of reading a biography and his published letters, and all his books save only two.

One of the two I didn't read, oddly, was the book widely considered his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. I always stumble and bruise my shins on the fake-liturgical intonations of the early going, and, without meaning to, drift away from my reading of it.

Men stood by their fences and looked at the ruined corn, drying fast now, only a little green showing through the film of dust. The men were silent and they did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men—to feel whether this time the men would break. The women studied the men’s faces secretly, for the corn could go, as long as something else remained. The children stood near by, drawing figures in the dust with bare toes, and the children sent exploring senses out to see whether men and women would break. The children peeked at the faces of the men and women, and then drew careful lines in the dust with their toes. Horses came to the watering troughs and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust. After a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant. Then the women knew that they were safe and that there was no break. Then they asked, What’ll we do? And the men replied, I don’t know. But it was all right. The women knew it was all right, and the watching children knew it was all right. Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole. The women went into the houses to their work, and the children began to play....

I had this idea at the time, which, in my mind, I called mo-bettering. When artists or people in any field catch a good vein, and create something beautiful or amazing, their next impulse is to do more of the same thing only grander and better. And, usually, that's when they stumble and fall. Bottle lightning, catch wind in a jar, it's not enough—humans being humans, they then want more—more glory, more greatness. They fall for all the praise, believe it, and strive to climb even higher. Bah, humbug. When you do that, that's when you end up with Chinese Democracy or Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, or any great athlete trying to hang on after the clock has run out. The more ambitious Steinbeck was, the less I liked him—I didn't understand the hoopla over East of Eden. I liked the "little" Steinbeck books: Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, The Moon is Down, Cannery Row. The beginning of Grapes was, to me, too much like Steinbeck trying to out-Steinbeck Steinbeck.

John Steinbeck in the 1930s. Photographer unknown.

I'm sure I'm wrong in this judgement...I'm just trying to explain (or guess, I guess) why I never kept reading on. And you know, I actually went back and tried Grapes again during COVID-19, and had the exact same reaction I did 45 years earlier! Hey, at least I'm consistent.  :-(

Well, anyway, I'm not into Steinbeck any more. Haven't been since I was young. Haven't re-read any of his books, although I remember the experience of exploring his work with great fondness, and I'm still an admirer. I respect where I was when I was there; I'm just not there any more.

AA
Same with Ansel Adams. I had an intense and passionate Adams period, which, again, was essentially youthful hero-worship. I read books by him and about him and pored over his pictures and went to see the Museum Set (meh! The worst printing of his life) and saved up and bought myself a view camera and a spot meter. In an argument with my brother Scott once, I called him the foremost photographer, and Scott teasingly referred to him as "Foremost" from then on. Early Adams-emulation is a commonality among a surprising number of photographers, I believe. He's literally an inspiration. What Strand did for Adams himself, Adams did for a lot of photographers of later generations—some of whom stayed in photography and found their own paths, and others of whom just dawdled a while (long enough to equip themselves? That's part of the fun), then left.

I took my Adams Period as far as I wanted to...which wasn't very far. It wasn't who I was, turned out. Two little lessons stand out in my mind: one was a picture called "Horses in a Field." The picture was of an empty field. In the 90-to-120 seconds it took me to set up the tripod, deploy the view camera, focus, cock the shutter, load the film holder, and pull the darkslide, the horses wandered out of the frame. Oh well. I exposed the frame anyway, as an object lesson. The second is a memory I have from when I was a teacher. I had set up a darkroom for myself in a closet at the school, and used to come in during off hours to print. Once I made a 16x20 print of a rural valley in lovely light—patchworks of fields, scattered small farms with their farmhouses, barns and silos—and I liked it, so I pinned it to the board. You could spy on and/or eavesdrop on the kids in that art room—it had been remodeled to incorporate what used to be the building's attic, so it had a lattice of mezzanine balconies that looked down on the main room below and the people in it. A few days after I put that picture up, I looked down from above and saw two students staring silently at my big landscape pinned to the board. After a while, one said, "It must be Mike's. Only Mike would take pictures of farmland." Then the two of them abruptly turned away and walked off. I would have laughed, except then I would have given myself away.

I not only don't look at Adams much any more, I have also moved on from Adamsian landscapes and Zoner tones in general. I still approve of him, admire his work, and remember my Adams period with fondness. I often have great admiration for his many acolytes. It's just not a strain of photography that means much to me personally any more. Rejecting Adams was useful, though—you can learn just as much from what you don't like as what you do, just as you can learn from failures as much as from successes.

Those are two artists I once loved. There's a longer list of photographers whose work I never really meshed with in the first place. How could it be otherwise, really? I could name a bunch of them. But why casually slander them? It's not actually slander, of course—we can't like everything. Your favorite artists are like people who become good friends: not everyone does. I like to think I respect photographers according to their accomplishment, and I certainly don't scorn those who love the ones I don't love. There's no hate involved. If others love a photographer whose work doesn't touch or move me, well, what of it? Nineteen times out of 20, or 39 out of 40, I don't think the less of them for it, not one bit.

An honest, clear-eyed response to work is part of enjoying art. If there's someone you like, often you might feel a deep bond to the work that's close to love. It's visceral and satisfying. And if there are great photographers deeply beloved of others who for some reason don't move the needle for you, what can you say? Can't love everything.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Alan Whiting: "Here's a conclusion I came to some years ago, after studying art of several kinds (from the outside; my background is science): no matter how great or wonderful a work of art is, there will be someone who is unmoved. The Hallelujah Chorus, the Sistine Chapel, Hamlet, whatever; there will never be total agreement that it's great, or even good. So it's impossible to please everyone, and you yourself may see nothing in a piece that everyone else is raving about."

Ilkka: "I started photography when I was 11. I didn’t have money to buy books, so I went to the library. I remember borrowing some Feininger books and struggling through Weston’s Daybooks. That didn’t inspire me much. But there were two books that I kept borrowing and reading, looking at the pictures, again and again. The Creation by Ernst Haas and Natural Light Photography by Adams [check Abebooks for that one —Ed.]. I read some of the other books in his basic photo series but kept coming back to that one. Maybe it was too deep so I needed to read it several times. But that was my foundation. Two totally different books about photography."

Geoff Wittig: "There's no accounting for taste in art. Why specific works move us, why we love them—while others leave us cold—isn't really a product of logical analysis. Despite all the art-speak and perceptual theorizing, it's emotional resonance that grabs us at some level. And that's often a product of where we are in our lives.

"This issue comes up a lot for painters; if you can paint anything, what do you paint? What are you trying to convey? What's your goal for your art, beyond just a pleasant picture?

"The wisest thing I've ever read about this is in painter and screenwriter Steve Allrich's 1996 book Oil Painting for the Serious Beginner. He asked his teacher, Eugene Hall, 'What makes a great painting?'

"Hall answered, 'Look at a million paintings, and paint a thousand paintings, and then you'll know.'

"It sounds like a trite brush-off, but Hall was exactly right. Look at a million paintings (or photographs), and soon enough you'll know what resonates with you. Then start making your own pictures, a lot of them. Most will fail, a few will succeed. And eventually you'll be making the pictures you need to make.

"That's the origin of my back-of-the-envelope theory of art, refined by a great conversation I had with one of my own teachers two years ago. I was asked for a one sentence definition of what I thought art was, and what I was trying to accomplish. The phrase 'condensed emotion' seemed to summarize it.

"That still works for me. Whether it's Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Mark O'Connor's Appalachia Waltz, one of Clyde Butcher's monumental prints of Florida's Everglades, or one of my own paintings. Capturing and conveying a moment of emotional truth that resonates with (at least some!) other human beings."

Andrew: "I shouldn't try to love every respected artist or piece of art, but it is valuable to learn why other people revere them."

Mark Sampson: "One thing (among many) that I learned from working for three years as a guard (ahem, 'museum associate') at the Phillips Collection [in Washington, D.C. —Ed.] was to respect the artist's effort, and accomplishment, without having to actually like the work. Standing all day in the galleries forces you to engage with the works on display, simply because you cannot escape them. Without naming any, I did learn to love artists who I hadn't known, or had dismissed, before. And there were a very few artists whose work I could neither respect or like. So it goes—such is life."

Richard Tugwell: "Andrew made a point that I learned from someone a long time ago—can't remember who it was. 'If you don't like something, try to understand why someone else does.'"