J. Malcolm Greany (American, 1915-1999)
Ansel Adams
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Man and imagination

Most people could not fail to know the superb landscape work of Ansel Adams (American, 1915-1999), that master of the large format camera that he used to produce stunning black and white silver gelatin photographs of great formal beauty and technical prowess, the rich detail and tonal range of his landscape photographs used “in service of what he called the “spiritual-emotional” aspects of parks and wilderness, conveying their restorative power to as wide an audience as possible.” His photographs are so well known that they became icons and he a legend in his own lifetime. But all is not as effortless in his beautiful modernist photographs as they seem.

Early landscape photographs from his 1927 portfolio Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras show Adams’ indebtedness to Pictorialist and Modernist photography. Indeed these elemental and muscular photographs show a dramatic use of dark and light hues in the near/far construction of the picture frame, the warm toned prints adding to their chthonic, almost underground and dystopian nature. Dark and brooding, dystopian and abstract. Those dark tones have a warmth that is contradictory – a lack of light: yet warmth! So there is a fiction at their heart… and that is why their dark brooding never seems a threat for they were based on a dream-world that couldn’t exist. What a difference to the later straight-ahead aesthetic of the artist and Group f64 (“a group founded by Adams of seven 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterised by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western viewpoint.” ~ Wikipedia).

Other mutations and obfuscations are hidden from view “in order” that the artist achieve his desired transcendence of the American landscape. Adams cropped out attendant carparks and people viewing the scene even as other artists such as Seema Weatherwax incorporated them into their work (in the 1940s) as “indelible reminders of a Yosemite modernised for tourism – reminders that Adams typically left out of his artistic work.” Adams even manipulated the negative where necessary, for example removing a road that inconveniently ran through the centre of a canyon that destroyed his imaginative (and Western) vision of the pristine Sierra Nevada. So much for his “absolute realism” and honest simplicity in service of a maximum emotional statement. …

An extractive, imaginative and emotional Western “nature” then, is at the heart of Adam’s work and his “marketing the view” – whether that be national parks, empty bays before the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, or Native Americans. While he was a tireless champion of photography as a legitimate form of fine art and an unremitting activist for conservation and wilderness preservation, Adams’ photographs are a creation of a myth of his own of a pristine wilderness which had never co-existed with man. To our benefit, Adams had his ideals and he let them manifest themselves in his imagination.

Dr Marcus Bunyan 2023

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Monolith – The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park
1927
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Pine Forest in Snow, Yosemite National Park
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
The Golden Gate Before the Bridge
1932
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Frozen Lake and Cliffs, Kaweah Gap, Sierra Nevada, California
1932
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park
1934
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park
About 1937
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Thunderstorm, Ghost Ranch, Chama River Valley, Northern New Mexico
1937
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Georgia O’Keeffe and Orville Cox
1937
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Dogwood, Yosemite National Park, California
1938
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Merced River, Cliffs, Autumn
1939
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona
1941
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico
1941
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
The Tetons and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming
1942
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Mount Williamson from Manzanar, Sierra Nevada, California
1944
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Alaska
1948
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park
1960
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Aspens, Northern New Mexico
1958
Gelatin silver print

 

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Self‑Portrait, Monument Valley, Utah
1958
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Ansel Adams exhibitions and photographs on Art Blart

~ Exhibition: ‘Ansel Adams in Our Time’ at the de Young museum, San Francisco, April – July 2023
~ Exhibition: ‘Ansel Adams in Our Time’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, December 2018 – February 2019
~ Exhibition: ‘Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs Of Ansel Adams’ at the Jundt Art Gallery, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, January – March 2014
~ Exhibition: ‘Ansel Adams: At the Water’s Edge’ at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem MA, June – October 2012
~Exhibition: ‘Ansel Adams: A Life’s Work’ at Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, May – October 2009