Photographic Inspirations: Robert Adams, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range (1974)

Robert Adams was one of the photographers showcased in the celebrated New Topographics exhibition held at George Eastman House in 1975, which explored the ‘man-altered landscape’. That is, instead of the romantic, picturesque or sublime tradition of landscape photography exemplified in the US by Ansel Adams, the Topographics participants did not try to avoid evidence of human presence or intervention, but instead made this their main subject. And their aesthetic was, in most cases, one of blankness and detachment: certainly there were no romantic, picturesque or sublime images. Much of the emphasis in New Topographics was on suburbia, on the liminal zones around cities that had greatly expanded in the post-war period, an expansion made possible both by the proliferation of cheap, generic housing estates, and by the huge increase in car ownership, along with the concomitant growth of freeways.

Robert Adams, however, was not blank. His approach was more critical. One of the reasons he carried weight for me was that he worked as an English lecturer while creating these images, and he’s an eloquent writer on photography. The New West is not text-heavy, but it does include a short introduction by John Szarkowski, followed by another from Adams, who also wrote brief passages introducing each of the five chapters into which The New West is divided. These move through consecutive ecological zones in Colorado, each characterised by different patterns of human settlement or intervention: ‘Prairie’, ‘Tracts and Mobile Homes’ (i.e. suburbs), ‘The City’, ‘Foothills’, and ‘Mountains’. However, apart from these very brief chapter introductions, we revert to the Evans/Frank model, with no text accompanying the images themselves other than short titles. As with American Photographs, the images are arranged one per spread on the recto, but with the titles on the preceding verso as in The Americans. The titles also follow the same pattern as Frank’s book, with most limited to a statement of location and/or a categorisation of subject (‘Along Interstate 25’, ‘Newly occupied tract homes. Colarado Springs’), with an occasional described detail or indication of context where Adams thinks it might not be sufficiently obvious from the image itself (‘Grazing land with pines. Near Falcone’). 

Szarkowski's foreword sets out the issues at stake succinctly:

As Americans we are scarred by the dream of innocence. In our hearts we still believe that the only truly beautiful landscape is an unpeopled one. …. Now however we are beginning to realize that there is no wilderness left. … a generous and accepting attitude toward nature requires that we learn to share the earth not only with ice, dust, mosquitoes, starlings, coyotes, and chicken hawks, but even with other people. (5)

Adams’s pictures describe with precision and fastidious justice some of the mortal and venial sins that we have committed against our land in recent decades. …. But his pictures also show us that these settlements express human aspirations, and that they are therefore not uninteresting. (8–9)

Though Robert Adams’s book assumes no moral postures, it does have a moral. Its moral is that the landscape is, for us, the place we live. If we have used it badly, we cannot therefore scorn it, without scorning ourselves. If we have abused it, broken its health, and erected upon it memorials to our ignorance, it is still our place, and before we can proceed we must learn to love it. (9)

Adams’s introduction is even more direct:

Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue—why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?

One reason is, of course, that we do not live in parks …. we also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.

The subject of these pictures is, in this sense, not tract homes or freeways but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range is astonishing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivisions, which we hate for the speculator’s greed, are at certain times of day transformed to a dry, cold brilliance. (11–12)

I haven’t seen the first edition of The New West, but the Steidl reprint from 2015 is of very high quality – along with the tri-tone reproductions, I suspect that digital pre-print processes and Photoshop have allowed a longer tonal range and greater sharpness relative to the first analogue edition. (I think there was also an earlier reprint in 2008, perhaps by Aperture, which I may in fact have a copy of in a box in a shed in Melbourne, but I'm consulting the 2015 edition for this post). 

Adams's images are mostly high-key, i.e. with predominantly bright tones and few shadows. As Tod Papageorge puts it: 

[he] printed his photographs to distill the brilliant Colorado sunlight to a virtually nuclear intensity that, even as it glared down on the poor things it exposed, seemed to envelop and, occasionally, succor them.

This effect is also due to the fact that a significant proportion of the images were shot close to midday, so that the light is coming straight down, and there's little shade. A more conventional photographer would have preferred the warmer, more sculptural side-lighting of late afternoon or early morning (as Evans did, for example).

In some ways, Adams’s approach recalls that of David Goldblatt, shooting in Apartheid-era South Africa, in which deliberate overexposure was used not only to suggest the cutting light of the veldt, but the brutal social realities depicted. There is nowhere to hide in this pitiless light, no escaping the photographer’s clear-eyed judgements. But Adams is careful to retain detail in the highlights. Papageorge relates how the latter used a particularly laborious developing method, because he wanted to make sure that the empty skies retained smooth tones (the skies are bright but never blown-out to pure white in these images). 

It’s also worth noting that the predominant high-key images are occasionally alternated with low-key images shot at dusk, or even at night. The Steidl edition has tritone reproductions, which means each image had three separate passes through the printer with different inks to ensure clear tonal separations. So there’s a high level of visual detail and texture, in both the shadows of the low-key images and the highlights of the high-key ones. In other words, things are described with great care – in all senses of the word.

Papageorge says that Adams used a Rolleiflex for these images – I shot many of my Venice photographs on a version of the same camera. Like the nearly identical camera used by Ed van der Elsken in the 50s, a Rolleiflex creates square negatives approximately 6x6cm, and most models of the camera have a fixed, ‘normal’ lens. If Papageorge is correct, that means that all of the images in The New West likely have the same undramatic angle of view – this seems plausible. (A few are slightly rectangular, but they may just have been cropped. Papageorge says that Adams did not obtain the 6x7 Pentax camera he used for his next project until after finishing The New West.) The square format adds to the sense of detachment, of little visual emphasis being given to any particular element within the frame. Similarly, most of the images maximise depth of field, and most are long shots, surveying landscapes from a considerable distance, sometimes with hundreds of metres or even several kilometres separating the foreground from the background.

Adams had used a large-format view camera for his earlier work on churches. The Rolleiflex allowed much faster operation, but did not permit perspective correction in the way that the larger camera did. This means that, for architectural subjects, you either have to point the camera up and get converging verticals, or stand back and accept that you’ll have a relatively large area of foreground below your main subject in the frame. In some of the landscapes, Adams seems to gone for the former strategy, in particular where there are no real vertical lines. The result is that the sky occupies two-thirds of the frame, to emphasise its enveloping weight. But for the tract houses that form the subject of the longest chapter he keeps the camera alignment level so that the verticals are straight. Many of these images do in fact have a wide strip of foreground: empty, bleached dirt or schist, or sometimes tarmac or pavement. Indeed, these houses and mobile homes are not really shot as architectural subjects, but again from some distance – that is, set within the larger landscape. And Adams uses the foreground to balance – almost seeming to reflect – the blank, or almost blank strip of sky above. In some cases, the houses appear lost between these two empty expanses. In other cases, Adams has obviously sought out an elevated viewpoint, so he was above his main subject, which allows him to create a more synthetic composition, linking houses in the foreground to the larger developments of which they form a part in the background. 

Only in the chapter on ‘The City’ does Adams get closer in, and perhaps not coincidentally, he’s also more explicitly judgemental here: ‘Here no expediency is forbidden. …. Read the eschatological chaos of signs.’ (75) Here Adams seems too bleak – for him, cities offer only 'disgust and nihilism' (11). But in the face of the current gathering climate catastrophe, he's elsewhere too optimistic in his conviction that 'even as we see the harm of our work and determine to correct it, we also see that nothing can, in the last analysis, intrude. Nothing permanently diminishes the affirmation of the sun.' (12) 

The New West is a powerful book, but it has a narrower thematic range than American Photographs, and less visual variety. The groupings into chapters are an essential part of the book’s organisation, but within the individual chapters I’m less convinced that the precise sequence of individual images is crucial. Rather, each chapter contains multiple variations on the same idea: the repetition and the standardised approach is part of the critique. Papageorge points out that Adams shares several motifs with Evans (who he claims not to have been influenced by): ‘cars, gas stations, roadways, jerrybuilt working class cottages, modest homes sighted down empty streets, improvised churches’. But for Evans these motifs are placed in the context of an encounter between industrial civilisation and popular culture: the mass-produced is juxtaposed with the handmade, the improvised. And Evans is interested in faces – the bodily correlate to the hand-painted signs and appropriated ephemera he also depicts – whereas the few visible humans in The New West are dwarfed by the landscape, and therefore stripped of personality (apart perhaps from the teenager sitting in the minute shade cast by a mobile home, for even the choice to seek that shelter depicts him as having agency). For Adams then, there does not seem to be any possibility of resistance to the shoddiness and soullessness of the world depicted – except, that is, via the light of his photographs.

I’ve already mentioned in my post on Brassaï that I overexposed my images of Venice: partly with the intention of approaching my subject differently to him, and partly by accident. Adams (and Goldblatt) helped me to think further about the aesthetics of overexposure – which I had to think about, whether I liked it or not, since overexposed images were what I had. I was also influenced by a conversation with Ross Gibson about his work on the historical police archive of crime-scene photographs in Sydney, in which deliberate overexposure was a way to ensure that none of the relevant information would be illegible in the image.

Adams’s compositional strategies weren’t of much use to me, since the kind of distance and/or elevation they rely upon are impossible to obtain in Venice (unless you resort to cliché and go up a belltower or stand on the Accademia bridge). But his broader approach was relevant, even though Venice seems to offer completely different lessons to the Colorado West. From its foundation the history of Venice involved radical interventions in the lagoon landscape, but the city has often been seen as an exemplary instance of equilibrium between human settlement and the environment, since Venice was dependent on the lagoon for its survival: for food, transport, access to the wider world, even sanitation. A photographic project more directly inspired by Adams might instead focus on the industrial hinterland of Porto Marghera on the mainland – and indeed there was such a project around the turn of the millenium, which actually recruited two of the original participants in the New Topographics show, among many other international and Italian photographers.

Adams’s example was nonetheless useful by analogy. Just as landscape photographers like Ansel Adams refused to acknowledge the existence of the man-altered landscape, most attempts to depict Venice refuse to acknowledge the contemporary, or decry its presence. Just as Ansel Adams chose to depict scenes in which the only acknowledged human presence was himself (‘acknowledged’ only insofar as someone had to be taking the photograph), so many visitors to Venice dream of finding an ‘unspoilt’ corner of the city in which they are the only alien presence – the only tourist chosen to enter Shrangi-La. So even though almost every detail in my images is not only ‘man-altered’ but human-made – emphatically historical rather than natural – I wanted to start by acknowledging and insisting upon the absurdity of this dream. There is no wilderness untouched by human culture; there is no unspoilt corner of Venice untouched by the contemporary world.

Photographic Inspirations: Walker Evans, American Photographs (1938)

If anyone asked me who my influences were, around the time I was making the photographs in Push Process, my answer was: Walker Evans, Walker Evans and Walker Evans. By which I meant, first, the Evans who created the images included in American Photographs, his classic monograph published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938; second, the Evans who worked on the New York subway from 1938–41, using a hidden 35mm camera to take anonymous portraits of the people sitting opposite him; and third, the Evans who used a Polaroid SX-70 to take pictures of colour fragments and textures in the last few years of his life in the early 1970s. But I progressed in reverse order: starting with a Polaroid Spectra, and eventually ending up with a 4x5 field camera.

I have a separate post planned on the subway photographs – in this one I’ll concentrate on American Photographs.

The first thing Evans taught me was a basic distinction between beautiful pictures and interesting ones. The best-known champion of photographic beauty is perhaps the American landscape photographer Ansel Adams. This is not to say that Adams photographed sunsets and other cliches – part of his ambition was to expand our idea of what constitutes beauty – but nonetheless his approach was an aesthetic and formalist one, which also found expression in his fetishization of the photographic print as a finely crafted artefact. Evans, by contrast, didn't care much for darkroom technique, and constantly recropped and reframed his images, sometimes literally cutting up his negatives to this end: the very opposite of treating them as sacred objects in the way that Adams did.

Adams and Evans were unsurprisingly not fans of each other’s work. Evans wrote in a letter about an early show by Adams that it was:

disappointing. His work is careful, studied, weak [Paul] Strand, self-conscious, mostly utterly pointless. An abandoned steam roller, quite beautiful, in the middle of a desert, titled ‘Capitalism 1933.’ Wood seasoned, rocks landscapes, filtered skies. All wrong.

And later, in a 1973 interview:

I draw something from being in nature, but I don’t use it. It bores. Those who do [use nature] like [Eliot] Porter and [Ansel] Adams bore me. I’m not interested in their art. I don’t even call it art. I’m interested in the hand of man and civilization.

From the other side, Adams mentioned Evans in several letters to friends. To his fellow photographic artiste Edward Weston: ‘Your shells will be remembered long after Evans’ picture of two destitutes in a doorway.’ And in another letter:

I am so goddamn mad over what people from the left tier think America is. Stinks, social and otherwise, are a poor excuse and imitation of the real beauty and power of the land and the real people inhabiting it. Evans has some beautiful things but they are lost in the struggle of social significance.

To the painter Georgia O’Keeffe on American Photographs:

I think the book is atrocious. But not Evans’s work in the true sense. …  It’s the putting of it all in a book of that kind – mixed social meanings, documentation, esthetics, sophistication (emotional slumming), etc. Just why the Museum would undertake to present that book is a mystery to me.

This is in part a misinterpretation by Adams of Evans’s purposes. The latter’s famous manifesto note to himself after agreeing to work for the government department of the Farm Security Administration in 1935 reads in all caps: 'NO POLITICS WHATEVER'. A reminder to resist the New Deal propaganda purposes of the FSA and pursue, as far as possible, his own ends. In fact, these certainly included an interest in the ‘real people inhabiting the land’ – along with the works of their hands, which he perhaps even thought beautiful, even if the amateur painted signs and impoverished interiors he chose as exemplars did not meet Adams’s quite different aesthetic standards. Though Adams’s misconception does perhaps point to the broader reception of Evans’s work at the time – most of the latter’s friends and acknowledged artistic peers were certainly of the left (Ben Shahn, James Agee). But Evans himself said in a 1974 interview:

I didn’t like the label that I unconsciously earned of being a social protest artist. I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.

I actually learnt how to use black-and-white film and a 4x5 field camera from Adams’s how-to books on the subject, although his obsessive attitude to technical precision was far beyond both my means and my inclinations. In choosing Evans as my model, I was not only in sympathy with his preference for culture over nature, but mindful of one of Garry Winogrand’s aphorisms to the effect: why photograph anything where the thing photographed is more compelling than the image of it? Surely the only reason to photograph is the possibility that the image changes the meaning of the photographed thing, or at least makes us see it differently? In other words, a photograph of a sunset or stunning natural landscape surely cannot transcend the original – can only point towards it, not make us see it in a new way. So why bother? Winogrand surely learned this lesson from Evans.

So it’s no surprise that few of the images in American Photographs depict picturesque things. But all of the images are intelligent, and most of them are interesting: that is, Evans was interested in what they depict, and the images invite us to share that interest. They are also photographed with care, ‘correctly’ exposed and printed (that is, rendered with as full as possible a tonal range), even if they lack the exquisite, jewel-like, quality of Adams’s prints. Many of Evans’s architectural subjects were shot in what he obviously considered to be optimal lighting conditions – that is, in direct sunlight and often in side lighting raked across facades to emphasise relief. These architectural subjects were all (or almost all) shot on an 8x10inch camera, necessarily mounted on a tripod: the very large negative produced a consequent richness of detail (Adams used a similar camera). This meant composing the image upside down and back-to-front on a ground-glass screen viewed from under a darkcloth. So they were never spontaneous or casual images, and Evans’s biography contains many references to him planning such shots in advance, returning to locales at times when he knew the sun would be in the right position.

The looser shots of people, mainly shot on smaller cameras, in many cases handheld on 35mm film, have more varied lighting effects and less meticulous technique, as you would expect. It’s worth noting that at this period, even a ‘fast’ film probably had a speed of about ISO100. So, even with a handheld camera, shooting in direct sunlight was not only optimal but often essential.

It was only after the publication of American Photographs that Evans embraced the idea that it was possible to obtain effective photographs in lighting conditions that made technical perfection impossible, when he ventured onto the New York subway with a 35mm camera.

Evans’s architectural compositions are notoriously flat, often shot head-on to facades, walls and other surfaces, and a higher than usual proportion seem to be telephoto compositions, which depict deep space but compress its several planes. I say ‘higher than usual’ because shooting close in on a wide-angle lens is conventionally the default for architectural photography.

What then do the images depict? American vernacular culture, including not only architecture, images (signs, posters), but also faces and costumes. Most of the photographs are of public and urban scenes, of exteriors, shop fronts, and anonymous streets. Unsurprisingly, there are no conventional landscapes at all, and barely any overt traces of nature other than the occasional tree or ploughed field.

Some of the images are portraits, but obviously taken outside and in the moment, of people encountered by chance in public. Some of this group are obviously not aware of being photographed; others appear indifferent, bemused or irritated, on the point of objecting or questioning the photographer’s intentions. Or, in a couple of cases in which people appear as smaller details against the larger backdrop of architectural subjects, they are a little more relaxed, both because Evans is obviously making no attempt to surprise them (it took some time to set up the large-format camera), and because they correctly infer that they are not the central subject of the image.

There are a few interiors: Evans’s biography makes it clear that these houses and apartments all belonged to friends, friends of friends, or to locales where Evans’s visit was arranged by the Farm Security Administration. In other words, he never negotiated access himself. There’s one image of people in a flood-relief camp, from an FSA assignment from 1937. And two images from the portfolio of Alabama tenant farmers that Evans created with James Agee in attendance as writer and intermediary in 1936, for their joint project later published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In these cases, the unguarded response was in effect offered to Agee, not Evans (‘Agee was very gifted … [at] making people feel all right. In fact, they began to love Agee and to be awfully interested.’) But most of the photographs of people were taken on the street, and there are more photographs of architecture than of people.

The earliest images date back to 1929 (with one solitary example from 1928), but probably two-thirds of them date from 1935–6, the most productive years of Evans’s career – and perhaps two-thirds of this latter group come from 1936. Just how productive this period was is illustrated by the fact that several ‘classic’ images by Evans from 1935–6 were not included in either the book of American Photographs, or the accompanying exhibition at MOMA in 1938.

This image, for example, is featured prominently in most Evans anthologies, and admired in part for its obvious metaphorical reading: that is, it depicts the life cycle of American workers, who, we might assume, live in the houses in the midground, work in the industrial sites in the background, and are buried in the foreground cemetery. Evans perhaps sidelined it precisely because this reading seemed too obvious an illustration of FSA propaganda purposes.

To understand Evans’s achievement, it’s useful to think about the difference between a series of photographs and a sequence. The former is exemplified by the typographical studies of Bernd and Hilla Becher from the 1970s and 80s, in which they photographed industrial structures – blast furnaces, pit heads, and so on – using a standardised method, that is, under equivalent (flat) lighting and always with a similar composition, viewpoint, framing, etc. The end result is a catalogue of forms, encouraging comparison and attention to minute variations, and usually displayed in grids. The precise order in which the images are viewed is unimportant: it’s the overall and cumulative effect that matters. Every image is of equal (un)importance, and the rhythm of their succession is unchanging.

This is still one of the dominant modes of contemporary photography, and indeed of contemporary art in general – endless repetition of the same idea, under the impression that such repetition intensifies rather than diminishes its force.

A sequence proceeds differently. In its simplest form, the succession of images marks intervals in time, which may be more or less regular. The nineteenth-century locomotion studies of Eadward Muybridge are an example of this approach applied under controlled conditions and with absolute regularity in the name of scientific accuracy, and hence with something of the same formal anonymity that often marks the series. But other sequences are situated within the flux of life, and aspire to the coherence of a narrative. To this end, they vary intervals, choosing significant moments centring on human drama, conflict and change. This kind of sequence used to be common in photojournalism and its narratives can be quite conventional, especially when they are explicated by written commentary, which often attempts to constrain their possible meanings – as we saw when discussing Paris After Dark. 

In other sequences, the logic is not governed by narrative or chronological succession, but rather by theme, so that the sequence proceeds dialectically, by the same principles as cinematic montage, and each successive image inflects, complicates or comments upon ideas introduced by its predecessors. This last is how American Photographs works, and its willingness to continually reframe its presentation of its themes is emphasised by the variety of images it contains, taken on different kinds of camera with quite different protocols of engagement. 

In the book, the images are displayed one per spread, on the recto, with a blank preceding verso, and no text at all, except for a list of titles at the end of each of its two parts, with a separate, general essay by Lincoln Kirstein at the very end (there’s some suggestion he helped finance the book’s publication as well). So, although the argument is created by the succession of images, each is encountered separately and we’re therefore encouraged to consider them as independent statements before thinking about their possible relation to what comes before and after.

Many people have written on the logic of the sequence, but to summarise some of their analysis: the book starts with an exterior of a business where one can obtain ID photos for driving licenses and so on, as if to say that what follows will in part be about the process of photographic representation itself, its purposes, and – given the shop’s presence is advertised by hand-painted fingerposts – about urban semiotics and pictorial representation in general, including the relation between the mechanised/industrial photograph and the handmade sign. The next image is a window display from a small-town photographer’s studio, a grid of dozens of sample head-and-shoulder portraits of smiling or neutral American faces. Again, this is about the conventions of photographic representation, already codified in the 1930s, but also about the idea of anonymity, a constant theme throughout Evans’s career. Popular culture is anonymous culture, and the studio photographer’s work is an example of American vernacular quite as much as the signs featured elsewhere in the sequence. The third image is a pair of young men photographed in the street, perhaps watching a parade, itself a conventional part of American public culture. They are shot using a quite different approach from that adopted by the studio photographer, but with the same interest in the range of anonymous physiognomy. The next image is then a political poster, with an idealised painting of a politician’s face (but likely based on a photograph), and displayed in another window. And so on.

There are eighty-seven images. It has to be said, however, that by the time we get to Part Two, which is mainly architectural views, the principle of succession seems to have become ‘Here’s an example of American vernacular architecture; here’s another; and another.’ Or, as Gerry Badger puts it, 'the book settles down to being merely an inventory of things'. So I’d agree with Badger that the book’s claim to sophistication and complexity really rests on its first half.

The accompanying exhibition had a different and slightly larger selection of images, and was also sequenced and arranged differently, in several shorter sub-groups linked by theme, and displayed in such a way as to challenge the pieties of Adams and his ilk, with some prints pasted directly onto the gallery wall.

Note that the book version only includes two images from those taken during Evans’s shared project with Agee in 1936, and both of those are variants compared to the versions included in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Presumably Evans wanted to keep the two books conceptually distinct, although he included many more of the Alabama images in the exhibition, where most of them made up a distinct sub-group.

The photographs in Push Process unashamedly follow Evans’s example: in their detached perspective and their formal variety, moving between 35mm handheld shots of people and large-format architectural images. Although my argument and themes are different, I’ve also included a long sequence of forty-eight images with no accompanying text in a manner analogous to American Photographs. I’m well aware this makes my work old-fashioned, even anachronistic. This was already true for the period in which I made the images – 2000–5 (or 2000–1 in the fictional narrative of the novel they accompany); even more so in 2024. But this belatedness didn’t seem important to me then – and still doesn’t now – both because my project in Venice was a historical one – in which category I also include the history of photography itself – and also because I don’t believe the possibilities of Evans’s approach have yet been exhausted. 

Here’s a video where I review the beginning of the long photosequence in Push Process in terms that are obviously indebted to Evans: 

 

Tone and Line in Photography and Drawing

Drawing is a binary system. In its purest form, it includes only black line and empty white space: one and zero. Forms are distinguished by tracing their edges as lines, and intermediate tones can only be simulated by a crude kind of optical illusion: that is, by cross-hatching. Line defines form.

Conversely, in a monochrome photograph, there is no absolute distinction between object and field, and there are no lines as such. A black-and-white photograph is a map of variations in tone along a single, continuous scale, which runs from pure white to pure black. This scale may be long or short, depending on contrast: that is, a high contrast image has a short tonal scale, with relatively few intermediate tones between white and black, so that the transitions from one tone to another are more visible and abrupt, whereas a low contrast image has a long tonal scale, with much smoother transitions. Another way of putting this is that, in a photograph, edge definition (known as acutance) is a function of contrast. Contrast defines form.

It therefore follows that, in a photograph, formlessness is a consequence of lack of contrast: that is, of lack of differentiation in the distribution of light. If the overall light levels are so low as to be beneath the threshold of the film or sensor, then it will process the scene as empty, and the resulting image will be pure black. Similarly, if the overall light levels are so intense as to render internal differences in reflective density between surfaces as irrelevant, then the resulting image will be pure white.

These principles also affect the distribution of light and tone within a normal image. Any given photograph will probably have some areas of ‘empty shadow’ where the light is not strong enough to cause the film to respond at all; conversely, it will also have areas of ‘blocked highlights’ in areas where the light is so intense as to overwhelm the film’s ability to discriminate between different reflective densities. The trick to exposing the image correctly is to get the balance right. In most images, this means placing the principal subject of the image at the mid-point between these two extremes. Conventionally, this mid-point is a grey tone with 18% saturation.

According to the philosophy of Ansel Adams, from whose instruction manuals I learnt how to photograph, a good print is one that exploits the entire tonal scale. For Adams, one of the great virtues of photography is its power of precise description, and the problem with high-contrast images is that they suppress detail. Adams believed that it is necessary to have small areas of pure black and pure white in a print to properly calibrate the tonal scale, but that these areas should not occupy a large part of the image’s total area, because whenever they do so, this results in loss of information. Large blank areas in a photograph are just wasted space: damning evidence that a photographer does not know how to fill them. In this approach, then, chiaroscuro effects, that is, deliberate restriction of the tonal scale in high-contrast images, are a kind of cheap melodrama, and an admission of failure on the part of a photographer who cannot find any other means to make an image eloquent. Judged on these criteria, the entire output of an artist like Bill Henson would be found wanting.

Adams did of course admit the possibility that some images might use such negative space effectively, and indeed his later prints tend more and more towards chiaroscuro, but the presumed norm for him was always maximum descriptive information, and the longest possible tonal scale. Individual scenes or prints might deviate from this norm according to the nature of the scene and the desired effect, but a photographer should have the entire tonal range available to her, even if she chooses not to use the entire range in a particular image.

When I began to photograph in Venice at night for the project that eventually became Push Process, I had Adams’ advice in mind. Initially, therefore, I tried to avoid large areas of empty black or white even in scenes that were inherently high-contrast. In part, this was to avoid fetishising the fact that I was working at night. Nonetheless, the resulting images are generally ‘low-key’ (that is, dark tones predominate, with selected areas of very bright tones around light sources). Distribution of light in a scene is inevitably quite different at night than it is during the day. It is, of course, much lower in intensity overall, but it also tends to be more constant (and therefore predictable) at night, whereas it may change drastically during the day according to the sun’s movements and the weather. What I wanted to do was to take advantage of the different appearance of scenes at night to defamiliarise them, without succumbing to the temptation to use those differences to romanticise the subjects. In some cases, particularly when there is no visible light source, there is something obviously odd about the lighting, but the night setting is not immediately apparent as such. Later on, I did resort to more chiaroscuro effects, when I was shooting hand-held and fighting against the limitations of the camera and film, but that was a deliberately artificial formal experiment: What can you achieve at the absolute limits of the equipment’s ability to function?

[Discussion continues in this post:]