Kodak as a company in history might be in its last death throes, but the film we all know, love and shoot is going to be around for a while longer.

Cheers – Reinhold

Your comment about undertones of Emerson and Thoreau is worth pursuing, but so is the issue of “modernity in the American wild” which complicates things. With Adams there is definitely such a link to Walden Pond given his long work in conservation as he photographed the American West. In a way, he and Weston are throwbacks to the 19th century (Weston’s favorite lens was a $5 Rapid Rectilinear, the technology of which was perfected by the 1870s — they are very sharp lenses; I have several) insofar as they really did not choose to use the latest greatest photo gear but rather clumsy old view cameras (usually). For them much of the 20th-century innovations in photography — rollfilm, enlargers, portable cameras and 35mm film — did not represent “improvements” for what they wanted to do. Those were largely market-driven “improvements” designed to put a camera in Everyman and Everywoman’s hands but at the cost of sacrificing potential image quality. Weston and Ansel almost always used large format sheet film and contact printed (no enlarger, thus no degradation of negative quality through enlargement). So, in a way, while they might have been dissociating themselves from European standards (but in fact were reacting directly against American Pictorialism on the West Coast), they were also reacting against modern trends in photography in America and the world. And that’s what makes them interesting….
Cheers,
Gerald

I was looking forward to this one.

I will try not to take sides but: (none of this is new)

1) A mechanical medium will always ‘improve’. What we hold as cutting edge today, due to the ineradicable ideal of “progress”, will be overturned by
2) Technology tomorrow which was neither today nor will be tomorrow properly understood and therefore should always be held suspect in that it may surreptitiously form our
3) Ideology, (or desire to steer clear from ideology) precisely because, technology as
4) Prosthesis, (whether it is the hubble camera, your john doe kodak, or the electron microscope), whether it is for ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ purposes, artistic or scientific reasons, the whole point is to learn to
5) Look.

Which no one can teach us.

A manifesto is nothing other than the naive or intelligent, self-serving or ‘altruistic’ assignation of limits, it naturally functions to include/exclude. And in the shaky foundations it is built upon there are many opportunities for something to go awry, creating a deviation which oftentimes distracts us from the point. But one positive side is that it restricts, it limits, and indeed in this case, it forces us to question: what is such a thing as “pure photography” or whatever other elementary concern (such as looking or reading or hearing or organizing a community) that is flagrantly or tacitly inscribed on its banner.

From our distance, and given that this was an American membership society, I can simply say that there is no correlation between their attempts and fascism (as you rightly say). I rather hear undertones of the writing of Thoreau and Emerson in that they are looking to dissociate their craft from European standards. But this brings up another set of difficulties, because there were modernity means a focus on the city in Europe, modernity is suddenly shifted to the American wild, and not in the 19th, but in the 20th C.

(not counting pictures of human suffering during the depression, which of course Hoover and the world looked at as if suffering were something new)