No art form has been more radically upended by the digital revolution than photography. The way photography was done for generations — film, darkrooms — was rendered obsolete so quickly by digital technology that it appeared to be on the fast track to extinction, to take its place beside the telegraph and the wax cylinder.
But in recent years, darkroom photography has experienced a mini rebound, at least in the realm of fine-art photography. So says Brian Taylor, the director of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel.
If Carmel is a holy site for enthusiasts of fine-art photography, then Taylor is one of its high priests. A longtime photography professor at San Jose State University, Taylor now presides over a gallery that shares its DNA with Group f/64, an association of fine art photographers based in San Francisco who, in the 1920s, established a bold new aesthetic that still dominates the art form almost a century later.
But in recent years, darkroom photography has experienced a mini rebound, at least in the realm of fine-art photography. So says Brian Taylor, the director of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel.
If Carmel is a holy site for enthusiasts of fine-art photography, then Taylor is one of its high priests. A longtime photography professor at San Jose State University, Taylor now presides over a gallery that shares its DNA with Group f/64, an association of fine art photographers based in San Francisco who, in the 1920s, established a bold new aesthetic that still dominates the art form almost a century later.
“Their belief was the only good photograph is a razor-sharp photograph, magnificently printed in glorious black-and-white,” Taylor says. “Up to that point, photographers were trying to make photographs look like paintings. They changed all that.”
Perhaps the two most celebrated names from Group f/64 are Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, both of whom discovered the natural beauty of Carmel in mid-life and both of whom spent the rest of their lives there. Weston was first seduced by the aesthetic possibilities he found in the kelp, shells and trees of Point Lobos. But his connection with Carmel was sealed when he met local girl Charis Wilson who because his muse, model and wife. Adams, who visited Weston in Carmel often, didn’t settle in the area until the early 1960s after Weston had died.
Today, those names still hang in the cool coastal air of Carmel, and professional and amateur photographers from all over the world come to this tony coastal village to bathe in the Weston/Adams mystique. “That legacy does bring people to this town,” Taylor says. Many of those photography pilgrims, he said, are younger people who come to the old-school approach looking for a more conscious and tactile process than digital provides.
In an era when everyone carries a digital camera in their pocket, “some young photographers,” Taylor says, “are turning away from digital and going analog, because very few people are following them down that road.”
The following are a few highlights of Brian Taylor’s walking tour of Carmel for those in search of the ghosts of
Adams and
Weston.