Last week, I was fortunate to go to Downtown Los Angeles to see the series of photos Ansel Adams made for Fortune Magazine in 1940. This was my first gallery viewing as an artist. I cannot really count my trips to MOMA or the Metropolitan Museum, when I went to New York in 2006, because I wasn't viewing the pictures, paintings and other art from an open mind.
Now that I have a bit of a background in photography, these pictures were very interesting. Most of what I was interested in was how fine grained the shots were, I use a high grain film made even higher since I mostly expose my film for 800 speed instead of its 400 ISO rating, and trying to figure out his reasoning for picking a specific location or point of view of the location.
There were quite a few pictures that I don't even think modern photographers would do, like this one of blurred bowlers and this double exposure right next to it. I also liked this long perspective shot. I understand that these pictures were for a magazine, but was not able to get an opinion on the point of these pictures other than to show the diverse and incredibly vast differences in lifestyles in as little as 10 miles apart. He caught these people living in ridiculously small trailers in Santa Monica, then went over to the densely populated Downtown and then to what looks like homes in Beverly Hills. He also spent a bit of time over at Lockheed in Burbank.
All in all, this was a very interesting Gallery series that had its ups and downs with what I found to be interesting. All the links go to thumbnails from the Drkrm website but you can view larger versions of the pictures at their website drkrm.com. The exhibit is around for two more weekends. It ends on March 17th, so if you have yet to see it, or would like to see it again, I suggest you get over there. There is no telling when It will be viewed again.
