Larry Lytle

Fabulous (in every sense of the word) collection of William Mortensen’s art. His vision is bizarre, uncanny, terrifying, repellant, fascinating … the material of dreams and the unconscious.

“Mortensen’s philosophy about what constituted a photographic ‘picture’ wouldn’t come into fashion in American art until the late twentieth century. He often took hundreds of exposures of his subject. He began with an idea, but allowed it to play out and metamorphose in its own way as he worked with his model. Something might happen during the session that would lead to an unexpected outcome that was better than the initial direction he had pursued. In this, he was a bit like a surrealist, allowing the vagaries of chance or fate to act as part of the creative process. It might not be until all the negatives were developed and the proof sheets made that he would notice previously unseen possibilities for an image that would then become the raw material for the finished picture.
“Once he decided upon the image that he felt best suited his idea, he set to work using his various methods of control, much like an artist may use Photoshop today. In this way he was essentially creating a new image that derived partly from a photograph and partly from his imagination. As he stated in PROJECTION CONTROL, the negative was only the starting point for the creation of the picture. Anything could be used to make the image, because for him, ‘the end justifies the means whether it takes mustard plaster or ketchup or whatever to make the picture.’ In a way, he was a nascent postmodernist who rejected the academically dictated use of conventional photographic materials to make a piece of art.
“….
“For Mortensen … the combination of multiple media was a perfectly acceptable way to convey a visual aesthetic or idea. What mattered was a mastery of technique and materials in their enhancement of the concept.” pp. 63-64

From Mortensen’s own writing, “Venus and Vulcan: an Essay on Creative Pictorialism”:
“The camera’s manner of ‘seeing’ is vastly different from the eye’s. While the visual angle of the eye is much wider than that of the camera, its range of attention is much narrower. Thus the literal vision of the camera greatly exceeds that of the eye, which is inclined to see only that which it wishes to see, noting the essential points and ignoring or subordinating the minor ones. The camera, however, diligently records trivialities along with important matters. But, in concentration and focusing of mental energy, the artist’s manner of seeing surpasses the normal manner as far as the eye surpasses the camera. Hence it is doubly imperative that photography learn to avail itself of selection to the same comprehensive degree that the older arts do: by this it must stand or fall as an art. Otherwise we must concede that the camera has no more artistic potentiality than a gas-meter, and that its finest flower is a photostat.” pg. 114

“Photography, like any other art, is a form of communication. The artist is not blowing bubbles for his own gratification, but is speaking a language, is TELLING SOMEBODY SOMETHING. Three corollaries are derived from this proposition.
“a. As a language, art fails unless it is clear and unequivocal in saying what it means.
“b. Ideas may be communicated, not things.
“c. Art expresses itself, as all languages do, in terms of symbols.” pg.133… (plus d'informations)