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Photography: What Does Art Look Like? | Richard B. Woodward

Ansel Adams, a piano prodigy before he picked up a camera, once declared that the photographic negative was like a musical „score,“ while the final print was akin to the concert „performance.“ This much-quoted simile, a reminder from a master teacher to respect every step of the photographic process, expressed an attitude that was old-fashioned by the 1960s and is even more so now in the digital era. As Adams was no doubt aware, numerous reputable artists (Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon) often had others print their negatives. To extend the Adams analogy, they composed songs or symphonies they did not always play themselves. What’s more, color film throughout much of the 20th century was so expensive and messy to process that almost everyone, including Adams, turned over the job to professional labs. All of these artists, though, if they delegated one step of the process to others, supervised the final results. And after death, if their estates authorized posthumous work, posterity was able to gauge how a print should look because identical or similar examples had been made when these artists were alive. But what if they had died and left behind rolls of film that no one ever developed, even as negatives? Do exposed frames even qualify as photographs or only as potential ones? How is someone supposed to know how to perform a „score“ that the artist never finished?……

See on online.wsj.com