Now, to respond: My father at one time in his life when he was teaching at the Ansel Adams workshops wrote in a letter to one of the lead staff. In that letter he expressed similar sentiment to what you have: It’s all been done. However, near the end of his life after he had lost his eyesight in 1999-2000, as part of an exercise from a memoir writing book, I asked Dad to dictate a letter to his grandchildren. I am still without children and thus he is without grandchildren, but the principle is the same. In his letter to his grandchildren Dad advised them above all else to find their own voice, to see their own vision. This appears somewhat contradictory to “it’s all been done,” but perhaps not. Perhaps even though it has all been done, those of us in art now can still take heart that we will be able to find our own voices. People who are young or new at something need to have reason to be optimistic, though I don’t necessarily perceive “it’s all been done” as entirely pessimistic either. Shakespeare said it and look what he created. Most, if not all of his plots were borrowed from other sources, but he certainly found his own voice. Also, it is quite evident in Dad’s early work that he often borrowed, or even “copied” as you call it, from his mentors Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and even Dorothea Lange and other early 19th and 20th century landscape photographers. Yet in my opinion, he succeeded in heeding his own advice to his grandchildren. Of Dad’s images my advisers and I have assembled for the website, the majority were selected mainly because no other photographer could have made them. I am in accord with working photographs in Photoshop, but with subtle, less saturated taste, just as Dad’s dye transfer prints. Fundamentally though, I agree with what you say photography is. I like your statement, “I learn to see what the camera sees rather than force what it captures to fit what I think it should see.” You are right on with, “That the direct-copy crowd enjoys any success at all, says more about the audience than it does about the images — for every educated art consumer there are a hundred thousand who don’t care how an image came to be, only that it looks like ‘That One’ and costs as little as possible.” That’s for sure. Those who merely wait for the light are not producing the landscape photography that will stick with mankind over the long term. There’s much more to landscape photography than picking a pretty scene and waiting for the light. Many of the same qualities that make other types of photographs great are the same as what make landscape photographs great. The idea in any art is to transcend subject matter anyway. Edward Weston said it best, “To photograph a rock, have it look like a rock but be more than a rock.”

I suspect our fathers had this discussion more than once — I have no idea if that premise is true, but judging from what you’ve said here, I suspect they held somewhat opposing views. At least publicly, anyway.

I think it was during the angst of my third attempt at having a creative career that had me asking Hal how to succeed (which is to say “make a living”) creating “art”. He had a lot to say on the subject: most of it boiled down to one simple, unhappy fact: “It’s all been done.”

Now that I’m older, I may begin to understand, at least as pertains to photography. I believe that all photography is copying — we don’t make the landscape or the nude, we make them tangible. In that sense, we may be the first to capture an image, or the first to promote it, but we are not Creators in the sense that a painter or sculptor might be — our visions are less what might be than what is, and perhaps less creative in the semantically literal sense than the other arts.

Somewhere there’s a quote of your dad saying that he didn’t wait for the light — it was that statement that brought me here, and an echo of something Hal said to Ansel, in public: “Landscape photography is easy; you just stand there and wait for the light.” Needless, I hope, to say, that that was not a popular statement, but the truth in it, painful as it may be to some, is clear — a goodly hunk of the practice of landscape photography is not of our own doing.

What I do when I’m doing “art photography” is to try to capture a moment or feeling of the awe and wonder (or pain and despair, or… ) I experience from the universe -and- to preserve and communicate it. That some few have seen and like my work is my validation… and the echoes of my meager efforts that I see reflected in other’s works is all I need of promised immortality.

Copying is educational — from the first caveman to spray ocher around his (or her) hand on a wall (and that was probably an accident (“What’s that in your mouth, Ogg?”)) we’ve learned by trying to reproduce what we’ve seen others do. We have the evidence of their efforts, and the tracks of the methods used as waypoints to mastery of our craft. Without copying, we each must blaze the technical trails that others have already cleared, and paved solid in granite and Dektol, as it were. Even if those waypoints are now programmed into our cameras, we copy by way of those who followed others’ paths to mastering the mechanism and chemistry that is painting with light.

And yet copying, for most who practice it, is futile. 99% of the millions of people who park their tripod in Ansel’s spots utterly fail to make images that are more than poor reflections of the original — even in those Yosemite workshops he taught. That the direct-copy crowd enjoys any success at all says more about the audience than it does about the images — for every educated art consumer there are a hundred thousand who don’t care how an image came to be, only that it looks like “That One” and costs as little as possible.

The techniques we share, be they large sheets of silver in gelatin or CCD sensors; Arca or Instamatic, aren’t really significant to my way of thinking (and Hal’s way of teaching)– it’s all just stuff. The tangible results aren’t truly that significant, either. In a thousand years most of it will be, at best, a memory, a reflection in some -other- pioneering eye, making copies of Ansel and Man Ray, who were translating those who went before -them-, should we be so fortunate as to have any technology remaining.

And then there’s the unstated question (if it was stated, I missed it!) “What is photography?”

To me, photography is what happens in the camera — I do my best to get the image I want to see in the exposure, not what I might do in the darkroom or on the computer. I learn to see what the camera sees rather than force what it captures to fit what I think it should see. Maybe that’s a failing on my part as an artist, but I think it’s a strong point as a photographer.

Post exposure manipulations, be they 20 steps in the darkroom to print Ansel’s “Moonrise Hernandez” or HDR stacking in Photoshop are something else that isn’t exactly photography. They either save a bad exposure or use it as a foundation to create something else. I love getting a good print out of a marginal negative, and I spend a lot of time playing with Photoshop, but that’s not photography, whatever it is. (Ducking into my flame-resistant bunker now.)

So, to cut my likely not very sensible ramblings short, photography and copying are Siamese twins. The Art in it arises in how we use that faithful reproduction of What Exists — there is as much Art in a purposeful print from an Instamatic (or my current choice, an iPhone) made with due consideration to the image as there is in a straight print from a ten zone 8×10 negative as there is from a heavily Photoshopped image-construct, all other things being equal. It’s the intent and the result rather than the “Stuff” used to get there.

Oh, just one last rambling thing… not to name drop as much to make a point: I was fortunate enough to hear Ansel play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on the Steinway more than once, both in San Francisco and Carmel. I would not trade that hearing for all his prints and all the tea in China. As much as I love his photography, it pales by comparison to his music.

He was **copying** Bach when he played — not just the notes on the page, but the breath, the blood and bone of the music… there was more of his passion evident in those few moments than in all the lovely images he produced. For me, his photographs are only the dim light reflecting from his music.

For anyone who missed the follow-up post, I did want to clarify that I deliberately expanded on Steve’s original thought in order to make my own point. I also wanted to thank him for pointing this fact out to anyone who may have seen the original thread. I hold Steve in the highest respect as a person, as a photographer, and as an artist.

Man Ray is a fantastic example of dedication and being true to one’s vision. Van Gogh is another. He lived in squalor and died poor, subsisting for years primarily on bread, coffee, and tobacco and sacrificing his health to afford painting supplies. Despite the hardship, he left us with an amazing legacy of beauty.

It’s obvious to me that the lessons here transcend any current-day considerations of what to photograph or what to sell or how to market one’s work. What’s at stake is a legacy for the ages – the things that will outlive us and the wisdom we may offer for those who will follow.

Beyond the vanity of the young, those of a certain age recognize the fleeting nature of our existence. What we remember of Van Gogh today is not the starved, sickly, disagreeable man (by some accounts of those who knew him) but the enduring beauty of his work, his intense passion for the subject, and his dedication to both the art at his subject matter.

How many of us will be so fortunate as to have our names outlive us and be associated with meaningful art or words? Certainly not those who spend their efforts producing replicas.

“I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.” –Vincent Van Gogh

Guy