More Than a Rock, 2nd Edition

Photographing Rocks73

Both you and I are incapable of devoting ourselves to contemporary social significances in our work; [. . .] I still believe there is a real social significance in a rock—a more important significance therein than in a line of unemployed. For that opinion I am charged with inhumanity, unawareness—I am dead, through, finished, a social liability, one who will be “liquidated” when the “great day” comes. Let it come.

—Ansel Adams (in a letter to Edward Weston, 1934)

During the turbulent days of the early 1930s, around the time of the founding of Group f/64 (by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, among others), Henri Cartier-Bresson is rumored to have commented, “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing ...