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Ansel Adams - Visualization versus Vision - Monolith

Home » Blog » Inspiration Creativity » ANSEL ADAMS AND VISUALIZATION VERSUS VISION – WHY VISION COMES FIRST

August 12, 2015 by Julia Anna Gospodarou

ANSEL ADAMS AND VISUALIZATION VERSUS VISION – WHY VISION COMES FIRST

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Connection With The Past © Julia Anna Gospodarou 2012 - Visualization versus Vision

Connection With The Past © Julia Anna Gospodarou 2012

Visualization, Pre-Visualization, Post-Visualization and VISION. What are they and why vision comes first?

I will explain all these terms and the relation among them in this article, by talking about Visualization versus Vision, two very important concepts and phases of the creative process in photography.

I’m starting with an image I created a couple of years ago in Athens in a very inspiring place, the hill of Areopagus, one of the most symbolic places in this city full of symbolism. This image is a combination of vision and visualization and if you read the article till the end you will see what I mean.

(Pre) Visualization – Ansel Adams

Many of you may be familiar with the term Pre-visualization or simply Visualization. The term Pre-visualization was attributed to Ansel Adams (see here a Pinterest collection I created with Ansel Adam’s best photographs), but in reality he never talks about “pre-visualization” but simply about “visualization”. The term and concept of visualization was made popular by Ansel Adams but its history is even longer. Ansel Adams discusses it for the first time in 1927 and then he uses it throughout his long career. He writes about visualization in the first book of his trilogy: “The Camera”, but he talks about it repeatedly also in the next two books: “The Negative”, “The Print”. I warmly recommend you to read this trilogy. Even if it treats subjects related to analog photography, you will learn a lot from it related to black and white photography. And then you can go read From Basics to Fine Art – Black and White Photography, by me and Joel Tjintjelaar, a book highly praised by critics, if you want to learn about fine art black and white photography.

Back to visualization, Ansel Adams describes it as the ability to see the scene you photograph and recreate in your mind the print you will produce. Meaning see your developed image, relying on the information you receive from the scene and on your developing intentions. The way he defines it is “the ability to anticipate a finished image before making the exposure”
You can see below a video where Ansel Adams talks about visualization, to get a better idea about what he means:

 

Ansel Adams’ first “visualization”

Here is the image Adams describes in his book The Negative, as being his first visualization: The Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, 1927. He shoots this photograph first with a yellow filter but he realizes after shooting it that the result would not express the mood he was after, since the yellow filter would not create the drama he needed to create in the image. As you can see in the image on the left, which is the images shot with a yellow filter, the result is rather neutral and not striking. Having realized this, Adams takes a second exposure, this time applying a red filter and the result is, as you can see on the right, much more intense, with a darker sky and richer shadows, which is what Ansel Adams had visualized before taking the photograph.

So, what he did was to choose the settings of the camera and the filter to use according to how the image would look when printed. He looked at the light and understood that he could filter it in a different way in order to get a more intense look by intensifying the blue light spectrum in the atmosphere. You can see yourself the difference. Even if Ansel Adams was intensively processing his images in the darkroom, the basis had to be there since in the analog darkroom photographers didn’t have the freedom and possibilities we have in the digital era to manipulate the image and create effects even if they weren’t there at the moment of shooting.

Ansel Adams - Visualization versus Vision - Monolith - Image with yellow filter
Ansel Adams – Visualization versus Vision- Monolith – Image with yellow filter
Ansel Adams - Visualization versus Vision - Monolith - Image with red filter
Ansel Adams – Visualization versus Vision – Monolith – Image with red filter

Tips and Tricks

How to create in seconds a dark sky in black and white photography

If Ansel Adams was processing his photos in Photoshop (I think he would have loved this), he might have not need to use the red filter when shooting but apply it in post-processing in Photoshop or Lightroom, or any other program. This is a tip I have shared with many and I’ll share it with you too because it is very useful and effective. If you want to create a dark sky in a black and white photograph, by starting from a blue sky, you can do yourself in post-processing (even if you didn’t do it in the phase of capture). What you have to do is to apply a red filter when you process the image and you will create darker and more intense skies and shadows. You can even play with the intensity of the filter so you create exactly the effect you need. One of my best tips for black and white photography.

Visualization – Edward Weston

Adams wasn’t though the first who talked about this concept and studied it. The first who talks about this subject is in 1921 Edward Weston (see here a Pinterest collection I created with Edward Weston’s best photographs), one of the photographers Ansel Adams admired and mentioned often in his works, one of the masters of photography of 20th century. Ansel Adams develops the term and makes it popular through his writings and workshops. This is why most people think today that he was the one who created the concept. However, he was the one who made the world of photography aware of this concept and practice.

Pre-visualization and Post-visualization – Minor White

Later on, there was another great photographer and theoretician who writes about visualization: Minor White (see here a Pinterest collection I created with Minor White’s best photographs),, in his book “Zone System Manual: How to Previsualize Your Pictures” , in 1968. If you don’t know Minor White you should definitely read his essays on photography. Minor White takes visualization a step further and he is actually the one who uses for the first time the term “pre-visualization” next to another new term in photography: “post-visualization”.

According to White, who mentions Adams as his source of inspiration for creating these 2 terms (White assisted Adams for a number of years being in close contact to his theories), pre-visualization is similar to visualization and it happens when you study the scene and try to create the best capture for your final print, while post-visualization is the ability to remember what you pre-visualized at the moment you are creating the print so the pre-visualized result is recreated in the print.

Post-visualization leaves theoretically more room for creativity as it involves intervening more extensively in your image to obtain an artistic result. We could say that post-visualization is closer to fine art photography than pre-visualization, and implicitly than visualization.

Minor White is the author of one of the quotes I like best in photography and that represents myself and what I think about fine art photography the best. What he says is…


“…all photographs are self-portraits.” – Minor White


 

I think this is the most concise and clear definition of fine art photography I could quote and it stands for all kinds of art.

Visualization versus Vision

My interpretation and why Vision comes first

Many photographers assimilate vision with (pre)visualization and think of vision as being the ability to see your image finished. I have heard this theory many times in my discussions with my students, with my fellow photographers or by reading their thoughts on the internet or in books. It is a largely expressed opinion, a conviction even, I may say.

However, I consider (Pre)visualization as an incipient form of VISION.
In my opinion, vision includes and precedes visualization, as vision is much more than just reading a scene and seeing how you will develop an image, either in analog photography by working in the darkroom, or in the digital era by processing it with the use of software.

In defining vision I am going beyond and enriching visualization (or pre and post-visualization) by adding the artist to the equation and by making him the most important element in the creation of a photograph. Visualization is a part of vision, but vision, as the idea that precedes the photograph and gives the impulse to the artist to create the photograph,  consists in more than this, it starts with the artist and with him/her expressing himself through the image he creates. If you want to know why we need vision read this article I wrote.


Visualization is a tool helping you create the photograph,

but VISION is the essence of the photograph.


The process of vision preceding visualization is in a way similar to what I do when creating black and white fine art photography with my method Photography Drawing.

What I do is to create an image starting from my vision and I anticipate the way I will process the photograph after capturing it, so the result shows my vision. I start with the vision, just as Ansel Adams starts with visualizing the end result, but for me going to the essence requires to start the process of creating the image even before visualizing it when I am in front of the subject. I first define my vision and intention and then, I visualize my image trying to be truthful to my initial vision. Many times my vision is born even before I find myself in front of the subject, and I recognize the subject and choose it just because it expresses my vision.


When we start with vision, we go even beyond what Ansel Adams calls visualization because we don’t start with the scene, with the subject, but we start with ourselves – with the artist – with our feelings and ideas that are those who initialize the process of creation.

The artist is a step before the subject in the process of creation in fine art photography, this is why vision comes first and then comes visualization.


I hope this will give you some food for thought and that you will start seeing vision as something deeper and more essential than just imagining how the final image will look when processed. Vision is not only capturing the image, it is not only processing it. Vision is the impulse that makes you create in the first place.

When you fully comprehend this, be sure you have moved a step closer to your art. This is why I insist so much on vision in my writings and in my mentoring courses and workshops, in all my educational activity. And I see the results every day in how my students transform the way they see and create their art by moving closer to their artistic self.

Conclusion

Visualization in the analog era – Vision in the digital era

By analyzing visualization versus vision I don’t intend to negate the importance of either concept: visualization, pre-visualization or post-visualization, or of either of their creators whom I highly respect and admire as photographers and thinkers.
But I feel the need to go further in analyzing and explaining fine art photography and implicitly vision in the digital era.

What I try to say with this article, with analyzing visualization versus vision, is that all these terms and concepts have become nowadays incomplete as for how you reach a final result in your image that is in line with who you are an artist. They rely on analog photography while the way we are creating now has changed radically through digital photography. This is why they need to be seen as a starting point and be enriched with our Vision.

Vision has become much easier to express in one’s work in digital photography through the use of software, so it is much easier to express our artistic self now in photography than it was in the analog era. Thus the concept of (en)Visionography I created and that is related directly to this.  The freedom the digital medium gives us is a tremendous opportunity for us to go a step further in photography and make the transition from “direct photography” to fine art photography, by including ourselves as artists (by means of our vision) into the images we make, thus create authentic emotion.

I will come back in a few days with another article on vision, where I will explain why you need vision in the first place. I wrote the article based on the questions I have gotten from my students so I hope it will answer your questions too. You can subscribe to receive the article when I publish it.

 

FURTHER STUDY RESOURCES – FINE ART BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY, ARCHITECTURE, LONG EXPOSURE

You can find more resources about fine art black and white photography, (en)Visionography, long exposure photography and architectural photography in my extensive collection of photography tutorials. To receive my future tutorials directly via email you can subscribe to my website.

More about how to create fine art photography, from vision to processing and the final image you can read in my book From Basics to Fine Art – Black and White Photography, with co-author Joel Tjintjelaar and in my video tutorial Long Exposure, Architecture, Fine Art Photography - Creating (en)Visionography a hands-on tutorial accompanied by an eBook presenting my processing workflow, or attend one of my workshops.

Julia Anna Gospodarou - (en)Visionographer

Julia Anna Gospodarou Fine Art black and white photographer Julia Anna Gospodarou is an internationally acclaimed photographer, architect with a Master degree, author and highly sought-after educator, teaching workshops and lecturing around the world. Founder of (en)Visionography™ and creator of Photography Drawing™, author of the best-selling book From Basics to Fine Art - Black and White Photography , with high distinctions in the most important photography competitions worldwide (International Photography Awards IPA Photographer of the Year, World Photography Awards SWPA and Hasselblad Masters finalist, as well as 80+ more awards), widely published internationally in books and magazines, Julia is passionate about the art in photography and striving to spread it into the world.
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_VIPA 2021 Jury_ I have the honor to be part of th _VIPA 2021 Jury_
I have the honor to be part of the jury in the VIPA 2021 Visions International Photo Awards that has just been launched.

I am warmly inviting you all to submit your images to the contest and I wish you good luck to win one or more of the awards. 

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Delighted to have won the Best of Nation Award for Delighted to have won the Best of Nation Award for Greece and be a Top 10 finalist in Commercial Category at WPC World Photographic Cup 2021.

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Fluid Time V – Aligning Paths The 5th image in m Fluid Time V – Aligning Paths
The 5th image in my Fluid Time series, shot in Chicago in 2013. 
You can find limited edition prints of this and more images at www.juliaannagospodarou.com 
I’m quite fond of this image, and I remember how much fun I had playing with the camera and the geometry to get a dynamic shot of the convergence of these 2 buildings. The image was shot with the 24 m TS lens of a Canon full frame. 
The particularity of this image is that I wanted to emphasize the composition's dynamism even more by using selective focus with the tilt function of the TS lens. One of the challenges was to place the area of focus in the right spot, given that focusing with the tilt function of TS lens is entirely different than the way we regularly focus. It took quite a bit of work and patience to get it right but it was worth it. 
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Fluid Time IV – Stopping Time This is the 4th im Fluid Time IV – Stopping Time
This is the 4th image in my 2013 Fluid Time series and it shows one of the iconic historical buildings in Chicago, the Wrigley Building. Finished in 1924 and built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, it was one of the first highrises built in the area. 
Here too, I used the tilt function of the tilt-shift lens, as in all the images in the series, and it was actually a quite challenging image to shoot because of the intensity of the effect I needed, which wasn’t easy to create. But the more challenging, the more I love it. Easy images are boring, isn’t it? As everything that is too easy. :) 
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Fluid Time III – Two Worlds The third image in m Fluid Time III – Two Worlds
The third image in my 2013 Fluid Time series. This is one of the most interesting buildings in Chicago, the Hancock Center. One of the things I love about this building, in terms of architectural design is that the structural frame of the building is placed exteriorly and not at the interior as usually, and it is visible on the façade. For those who are wondering, this x-braced reinforcement system allows for larger open spaces in the interior of the building which is why it is ideal for an office building like this, and it also allows for rising taller structures. When it was built, in 1965, the Hancock Center was meant to be the second taller building in the world. 
Like all the images in the series, here too, I used the tilt function of the tilt-shift lens, to focus on the relation between the 2 buildings – hence the title: Two Worlds. 
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Fluid Time II – Utopian Connections Second in my Fluid Time II – Utopian Connections
Second in my 2013 Fluid Time series, this image shows the Prudential Plaza Tower in Chicago, flanked by the Prudential Plaza One building and the Aon Center.
Here I used again the tilt function of the tilt-shift lens, as I did in all the images in this series, to isolate different planes of focus in order to create depth. 
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