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March 13, 2009
According to Britt Salvesen in Surrealistic and disturbing’ Timothy O’Sullivan as Seen by Ansel Adams in the 1930s in the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas the canon of American straight photography was formed against the competing aesthetics of pictorialism and experimental formalism. It pointed to models from the past such as O’Sullivan to prove that photography had always been, or was inherently, straight and realistic.
South side of Inscription Rock, N.M. Photograph by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1873, as part of the series "Geographical explorations and surveys west of the 100th meridian", sponsored by the United States War Department, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Beginning with Ansel Adams and Beaumont Newhall, Sullivan has been associated with the achievement of something beyond vulgar realism, that is, mere recording or description. His was the “primitive eye” or “natural vision”. This innocence implied no knowledge of the conventions of realism. Yet Sullivan was also seen as an artist by Adams and Newhall.
Salvesen says that Adams and Newhalll were concerned to establish photogpraphy's independence from painting, its truthfulness, its capacity to depart from ordinary perception and stimulate insight, and its Americanness.
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For straight photography to
triumph, it had to have straight antecedents. With this lineage running through the center of photography’s history, pictorialist and surrealist practices could be marginalized as dead ends or aberrations.