Zone System - Misconceptions and Criticisms

Misconceptions and Criticisms

The Zone System gained an early reputation for being complex, difficult to understand, and impractical to apply to real-life shooting situations and equipment. Noted photographer Andreas Feininger wrote in 1976,

I deliberately omitted discussing the so-called Zone System of film exposure determination in this book because in my opinion it makes mountains out of molehills, complicates matters out of all proportions, does not produce any results that cannot be accomplished more easily with methods discussed in this text, and is a ritual if not a form of cult rather than a practical technical procedure.

Much of the difficulty may have resulted from Adams’s early books, which he wrote without the assistance of a professional editor; he later conceded (Adams 1985, 325) that this was a mistake. Picker (1974) provided a concise and simple treatment that helped demystify the process. Adams’s later Photography Series published in the early 1980s (and written with the assistance of Robert Baker) also proved far more comprehensible to the average photographer.

The Zone System has often been thought to apply only to certain materials, such as black-and-white sheet film and black-and-white photographic prints. Adams (1981, xii) suggested that when new materials become available, the Zone System is adapted rather than discarded. He anticipated the digital age, stating

I believe the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.

Yet another misconception is that the Zone System emphasizes technique at the expense of creativity. Some practitioners have treated the Zone System as if it were an end in itself, but Adams made it clear that the Zone System was an enabling technique rather than the ultimate objective.