Score and Performance

I had the good fortune recently to visit the Ansel Adams: At the Water’s Edge exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. In addition to being moved by the majesty and poignancy of the images presented, I enjoyed learning more about this pioneering artist’s approach to his medium. The wall text for the exhibit, coordinated by the museum’s curator of photography, Phillip Prodger, provides lots of meaningful context.

One particularly interesting note accompanied the large print of The Tetons and the Snake River from 1942:

“Adams famously likened negative and print to the score and performance in music. Because the negative contains all the information necessary to make a picture, he considered that the “score” of a photograph. And because printing in the darkroom requires interpretation that can vary according to the attitude of the printer, he considered that the “performance.” According to this idea, Adams changed the way he printed many of his negatives over time.”

Now, unless you’re a Photoshop user, you might not do much interpreting of your pictures these days; it’s so convenient to set your digital camera to automatic and let it do its thing. But this idea of score and performance struck me as relevant to something bigger than photography. I think it’s a nice way to think about the human capacity for change.

We all have the “negatives” we’re printed from: The inherited traits encoded into our DNA, the family systems we grew up in, our MBTI profiles and zodiac signs. But isn’t there an equal measure of “performance” that accounts for who we are? It seems to me that our ability to vary our interpretation of the encoded Self over time is what aspiration and choice are all about.

What attitude are you bringing to the darkroom lately?