Mark Ruwedel

“ Ma che triste Roberto, la fabbrica dell'arte, non lo sapevo. Non dubito che Fontana e Manzoni fossero allegri, tant'è vero che ho parlato di scherzi elevati ad arte. Chi ci si è arricchito si è divertito più di tutti. „

“ Una foto spaiata di quel genere non dice nulla, né ieri né oggi. Se la foto è particolarmente bella per la luce o altro, si può pensare: che bella foto! Ma in questo caso la foto non è straordinaria. Perché abbia un valore deve far parte di un insieme, un progetto o reportage, chiamiamolo come vogliamo, che abbia un tema. In questo caso è l'insieme delle foto ciò che ha un senso. „

“ Q: One of the things in looking at the other images that we showed, Robert Adams and Baltz, Lee Freelander and also Frank Gohlke and you really reinvented the way photographs were printed in the 70s, that the language really changed, I think what most audiences were used to looking at was an Ansel Adams; you have a black black and a white white, and it's a nice kind of…, you can find every zone in a 1 through 10 represented in there and even in photographers like Minor White or Paul Caponigro grew up in making landscape photographs after that and you guys took that tonal range and kind of pressed all towards this high end.
Gossage: well, the zone system is the most perverse system. I mean, it basically… all it does is allow you, … the zone system is Ansel Adams' system for exposure, by the way, so you'd get the most tone out of what the film gave you. What we were clearly about was not making operatic kind of prints, we were interested in reproducing experience. And there wasn't any technical rebellion as much as, I mean, Ansel's pictures don't look like anywhere anyone's ever been except, you know, the sets behind Metropolitan Opera. It wasn't real. We couldn't, … you know…, it was the 70s, we wanted everything to be really real man, …
Q: Your hair was longer, too…
Gossage: yeah
Q: Thre was something that Frank Gohlke recently said that… He said “I wanted to make pictures that look like they were hard and bright and sharp because that's what we thought America looked like in the 70s”.
Gossage: Exactly. You know, it was trying to find something translated to black and white for most of us, that seemed authentic; and there were no rules for how one printed that. One thing about the photography that exploded in the 70s was the sense that there were no rules that you had to apply anymore. Sons and daughters of Ansel Adams weren't the ones that hit prominence, it was everyone else that had that come before them. So you know, and for the first time a serious look at history, too. People did look at Ansel, they looked at Edward Weston, that lead to Ansel and everything.
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“ Riporto questo brano di intervista, a proposito della opposizione tra i due Adams, è un intervista a Gossage non a Robert Adams, ma penso spieghi il sentire dell'epoca: „