Teaching Photography: Notes Assembled

The Zone System

43 In the fall of 1958, I began to study photography at the California School of Fine Arts. Later the name changed to the San Francisco Art Institute. One of the classes required of all photography students (there were about 10 of us) was with Ansel Adams. At one of the first meetings, he took us out to the backyard of the school with a Polaroid camera, which at the time was a rare item. Ansel had some sort of arrangement with the company so he got a lot of their materials and they got some of his pictures to use in advertising promotion. There was a door. With the aid of his S.E.I. meter, Ansel was going to render the door zone V. He said that he would then render it zone II and then zone VIII. It didn’t work out. Polaroid prints and all the debris that they leave behind started to accumulate over the yard. When he said he was doing zone V he would get zone III or VII, etc. A lot of film was used. Ansel was getting more and more upset and we started to giggle. That was my introduction to the zone system. A few weeks later Ansel stopped teaching at the school saying that he was too busy. He said he didn’t think we were very serious students anyway. If I sit in a room and look around when the light is not particularly dramatic, I will be hard-pressed to identify any object or part of an object that is an untextured black. If I then shift my attention to the other side of the tonal scale, I will also be hard-pressed to identify any object that is an untextured white. There are very few instances of black or white in our visual lives. If I go out at night in the city, I will see almost no untextured black, but some white because of light sources. Consequently, if I want to make a photograph that renders the tones of the subject and gives the illusion of faithfulness – I use the term faithfulness rather than ‘realistic’ or ‘accurate’ because these terms do not THE ZONE SYSTEM 44 apply to photographs, the print will rarely contain untextured black or white. It’s important to point out that this is not a moral issue or even an aesthetic one; it is a way to understand the process and how to use it. Many important photographs have been made using paper white and untextured black. If I then choose to introduce areas of black or white in my prints it will be with intention rather than neglect. Clearly, when the exposure is made, enough light must be allowed to strike the film so that the darkest objects are affected to some degree. Therefore, exposure is determined by the darkest significant area of the picture . If an area gets no exposure, then even if the film is developed for a week, there will be no image and the print will be black in that area. The degree of development is determined by four factors: Strength of developer, Temperature of developer, Agitation given, Length of time of the development. The more the film is developed , the more density the lighter areas of the picture will contain. Therefore, these areas will tend to be lighter in the print. That is the principle; how it’s used depends on how one wants to work. The view-camera person can measure and test to a point where everything is completely predictable. (Minor White’s Zone System Manual will get you there without much pain.) The small-camera user can simply pay attention to the shadows and find a developing time and temperature that will generally place tones in a way that the desired contrast can be arrived at with the use of filters when printing. (This is explained by David Vestal in The Art of Enlarging.) Technology is not the central issue. The problem lies in the growth of a sensitivity on the part of the photographer toward the use of tone as content in making pictures that have real substance. Musical tone, tone of voice, emotional tone, tone poem, tone vibrations , tone of movement. ...