E. Weston does have that famous quote that goes something like "the
image fixed forever as seen on the groundglass before the shutter is
released", but thank goodness he didn't practice what he preached,
either (s).
It would be fair to say that visualization (I'll use the Adams term, he
hated the "pre" that Minor White added) in a mechanical or technical
sense is not a fallacy. The zone system is a fine technical means to
workable negatives, it's just when it gets turned into a mystical
experience that the trouble begins, or when people convince themselves
that they are really "seeing" the print when they look at the world.
Another famous quote is from Adams, about the negative being the score
and the print the performance. I think it seriously underplays the
amount of manipulation he used: Adams the "musician" drastically rewrote
the "composer's" scores.
The essential problem with visualization in the fullest sense is that
the real world is a world, and the print is a print. When we study and
respond to the world--one of your environmental spaces or one of my
trees by the river-- we are tuned in to it. When it's time to print, we
need to remember what we felt, but it cannot be _transferred_ to a piece
of paper with metal on it. It must be translated, interpreted,
re-invented as two dimensional art because it is no longer a tree or a
river or an environmental space. The feedback of printmaking is the
process that helps us find a printing that gives an equivalent to our
original experience of the subject. It's always struck me as strange
that the Stieglitz notion of "equivalents" is often presented as far-out
or radical. It strikes me as a straightforward description of what all
photographs are by their nature. Some just do it better than others.
---Carl