Why Are The Great Photographers Great? f/62

A few weeks ago, I had a great exchange with Joel, a friend of the show. We were talking about a set of original Ansel Adams prints on sale. Some of the photos are amazing and stop me dead in my tracks. They simply captivate. Yet other works… are less enthralling. They are, dare I say, average. I think that’s fair when measured against today’s standards. Maybe they are images we have seen already. Or maybe it is a concept we are familiar with now.

So what makes photographers like Ansel Adams so great? What makes the past masters of photography deserve our reverence? It comes down to a single word - vision. The masters of old had singular, unique vision. They showed us our world in a different way, made visible something the rest of us didn’t see.

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