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William Mortensen, self-portrait, courtesy of A Journey Round My Skull.
Growing up on the west coast, I became exceedingly familiar with two things: jam bands, and Ansel Adams. Not that I dislike Ansel Adams; when I was living in Cleveland, the Adams print I hung over my stove got me through some pretty homesick months, especially during the whiteout that is January around Lake Erie. And I am definitely going to go see the Ansel Adams exhibit currently on display at the Saint Louis Art Museum, a collection of photographs of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
As much as I admire his artistry, his restraint, his technique and his class, I do hold one thing against Adams: ruining the career, or attempting to ruin the career, of one William Mortensen.
Mortensen has been called a "Gothic Modernist;" he is notable because he continued to embrace the Pictorialist movement long after it had gone out of fashion (Pictorialists -- Adams was an early adherent -- manipulated photographs to make them more "painterly"). Because Mortensen was based in Hollywood, where artifice, fantasty and over-the-top aesthetics are always welcome, he was able to use that technique to his advantage. For two decades, he was Hollywood's hottest portrait photographer, and made his living shooting celebrities like Fay Wray and Marlene Deitrich. He also pursued his own fine art photography, and while his work is not really aligned to my aesthetics so much, I admire his mastery of photographic technique (and some of his photos are truly beautiful). But apparently his gothc sensibilities deeply offended Ansel Adams and a cabal of fine-art photographers who favored the naturalist school of photography; they went after Mortensen with a tar-brush. From the above-linked article on Photo.net:
"...the f/64 group, spearheaded by Ansel Adams and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall (curators with the Museum of Modern Art), it was not enough merely to disagree philosophically with Mortensen. Had they done so, it would have been unlikely that Mortensen would have been forgotten and ignored so during his own lifetime and after his death, for he was something more than just another painterly salon photographer: His compositions were steeped in Gothic and Romantic traditions, his subject matter often whimsical, often bizarre, his style a strange combination of Lorenzo de Bernini, Edgar Allan Poe, Man Ray, Salvador Dali and Maxfield Parrish.
In his essay, 'Beyond Recall,' photographer A.D. Coleman -- who is quite sympathetic to the Adams aesthetic -- presents a scathing indictment of Adams and the Newhalls, and their active campaign to completely shut out Mortensen from the elite artistic inner circles. Although he never said so, it is evident from reading these essays that Mortensen died a broken man. Even after Mortensen's death, 'Saint Ansel' Adams tried to prevent Mortensen's work from being archived at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Fortunately, for posterity, curator James Enyeart (who, though a friend of Adams) remained objective, and was instrumental in finding a permanent home for Mortensen's artistic legacy.
Sadly, little remains of his artistic output: Most of Mortensen's negaives are missing, whereabouts unknown. He also left few notes or letters. No conclusions can be drawn, but it is strongly suggested that by the time he died Mortensen felt so irrelevant to the history of photography that he never bothered to leave much behind."
And that's a shame. It makes me wonder what else has been squeezed out of the artistic canon for not adhering to the sensibilities of the day. Mortensen's being rediscovered now, but until the art world has its own version of the Numero Group, we just have to assume that a large percentage of visionary weirdoes are falling through the cracks. --Stefene Russell
