Lesson 2 Quiz

Ansel Adams spent decades photographing the American West in black and white, elevating landscape photography to fine art through meticulous technique and large-format precision.

The zone system divides a scene's tonal range into eleven zones from pure black to pure white, letting photographers pre-visualize exposure decisions to place any tone exactly where they want it.

Group f/64 took its name from a very small aperture setting on large-format view cameras, one that gives deep depth of field and fine detail. The members, Ansel Adams among them, wanted sharp, straight photographs instead of the soft-focus pictorialist look that was popular before them.

Brassai, the Hungarian-born photographer who worked in Paris, walked the city at night photographing cafes, bars, fog-lit streets and bridges. His long night exposures made the after-dark city a subject in its own right. Ansel Adams and Robert Capa are known for landscapes and war, not Paris nights.

Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night) collected Brassai's night photographs of the city's streets, monuments and nightlife. It was one of the first photobooks built around a city after dark. Death of a Spanish Loyalist is a Robert Capa photograph, not a Brassai book.

Capa's motto captures a core tension in photojournalism: proximity creates emotional connection, and staying physically or emotionally distant produces images that leave viewers cold.

Capa documented five conflicts over two decades, from the Spanish Civil War through the first Indochina War. His sustained war coverage established photojournalism as a discipline requiring both courage and craft.

Ed van der Elsken was a Dutch documentary photographer who worked close to people living at the edges of society: bohemian youth, outsiders and the poor. His raw, personal pictures show social and political realities from the inside, which is why he is remembered for that subject matter rather than fashion or war.

Ed van der Elsken photographed jazz musicians in Amsterdam between 1955 and 1959, mostly at night concerts, working by available light without flash. The pictures were published in 1959 as the book Jazz.

Sigismondi builds surreal, hyper-stylized worlds in her images rather than recording reality. Her language of entropic underworlds signals a deliberately dark, constructed aesthetic that blurs photography with narrative illustration.