Photography in Print Vicki Goldberg Paul Strands Art Motive in Photography Stieglitz

Burt Chernow Galleries
Housatonic Museum of Art
Housatonic Community Higher
900 Lafayette Blvd., Bridgeport, CT 06604

For data telephone call
Robbin Zella, Manager,
203-332-5052.

Peter Barr

";Ansel Adams, America's Saint George of Conservation";
November, 2000

 

Ansel Adams (1902 -151; 1984) is arguably one of the nigh honey figures in the history of American photography.ⁱ His work bears all of the stylistic qualities needed to guarantee its success: it appears plainspoken and straightforward, and presents the natural world in a crisp, realistic way. But Adams'due south straightforward photographic style masks his remarkably complicated motivations. His images and published thoughts reflect a complex blend of aesthetic idealism and radical political engagement that is often overlooked. Equal parts aesthete and social activist, Adams hoped that his abrupt-focused black-and-white photographs would assist persuade Americans to value creativity too equally to conserve and expand American freedoms and wilderness preserves.

Adams, who is celebrated by both elite academics and the general public alike, concluded his formal teaching with grammar school. Since and then he has been awarded six honorary degrees, including doctorates from Berkeley and Harvard. In 1979, his thirty-2d book, entitled Yosemite and the Range of Light, sold more than 200,000 copies, becoming ane of the acknowledged photographic monographs ever. Two years afterwards, his landscape-sized impress of Moonrise, Hernandez, New United mexican states set an auction record for photography, fetching $71,500.00. By 1984, the year he died, his work had appeared in more than 500 exhibitions. Today, reproductions of his images can be found on address books, calendars, folios, screen savers, posters and in more than eighty publications, including his widely read autobiography and two contempo biographies - all readily available on the internet.

Adams's fame is not new, but began in the early 1930s, soon after he decided to commit himself professionally to the medium of photography. Trained showtime as a classical pianist, he dabbled in apprentice photography for more than than a decade before deciding to carelessness a career in music for professional photography. This decision was motivated past businesslike and idealistic considerations. On the one manus, in the 1920s, advertisers increasingly patronized photographers because they believed that photographs were more persuasive than hand-drawn illustrations.ⁱⁱ For about of his career, Adams was able to earn a relatively steady source of income from his commercial work. On the other hand, Adams was inspired by what he perceived to be the aesthetic potential of the medium. In 1926, Albert Bender, an fine art collector and possessor of a small insurance agency in San Francisco, encouraged this idealism past financing Adams's early aesthetic work. Bender'southward generosity resulted both in Adams's first published book, Taos Pueblo, and in his beginning one-person exhibition, at the Sierra Club in San Francisco. This led to his 1930 meeting in New Mexico with the prominent New York lensman Paul Strand. Strand invited Adams to examine a gear up of his recent negatives, which convinced Adams of photography's potential as a medium of fine art.

Within five years of meeting Strand, Adams emerged as ane of the most influential figures in the world of art photography. By the end of 1930, he was writing a photography column for the literary review Fortnightly. Ii years after, Adams helped found the photography social club Group f/64. He organized the group's landmark exhibition of ";pure"; photography at the M. H. de Immature Museum, and authored their manifesto, which argued vehemently against the tradition of making fine art photographs look like impressionistic paintings or etchings. The following year he met Alfred Stieglitz, the legendary New York fine art dealer and ";pure"; photographer and opened The Ansel Adams Gallery for artistic photography -150; with the idea of becoming the ";Alfred Stieglitz"; of San Francisco. And so, in 1935, he published the commencement of several instructional books on photography, which earned him a reputation as an effective teacher and exacting photographic technician.

Every bit a teacher and technician, Adams is mayhap best known for testing Edwin Land's Polaroid moving picture engineering and for instructing aspiring artists on how to use his own Zone System of photography, which he developed while pedagogy at the Art Middle School in Los Angeles in 1941. This arrangement allows photographers to calculate and command the range of grey-scale tones in their negatives past using a light meter. The objective is to obtain a negative with silver densities respective to the lensman's preconception of the scene. For Adams, this usually meant a mesmerizing number of singled-out shades of grey, black and white, as in his photograph, Aspens (1958). Farther, he encouraged artists to manipulate their images' tones while developing and press. Adams compared printmaking to a musical performance past likening the tonal values of a negative to the notes on a musical score. Like a musical performance, the print was so discipline to variation and reinterpretation over fourth dimension.^three

Adams's technical accomplishments often overshadow the fact that he intended for his photographs to express his radical aesthetic and political ideals. His aesthetic ideals can be traced dorsum through Paul Strand to Alfred Stieglitz. Adams, similar Stieglitz, regularly preached a ";pure"; photographic aesthetic imbued with emotion; he claimed that his photographic prints represented what Stieglitz called ";equivalents"; of his feelings.⁴ Adams, too, claimed that art photographers created ";a argument that goes across the subject field"; and captured ";an inspired moment on film."; ⁵ By way of contrast, he felt ordinary photographs were mere ";visual diaries"; or ";reminders of experience."; Adams elaborated on this idea near the terminate of his life, comparing his ain (and his friend Edward Weston's) photographs to those of William Henry Jackson, who photographed the American West for the U.S. Government'south Hayden Geological Survey in 1870:

Jackson, for all his devotion to the subject, was recording the scene. Weston, on the other hand, was actually creating something new-133;. Similarly, while the landscapes that I have photographed in Yosemite are recognized by almost people and, of form the subject is an of import part of the pictures, they are not ";realistic."; All my pictures are optically very accurate - I use pretty skilful lenses -150; but they are quite unrealistic in terms of [tonal] values. A more realistic, simple snapshot captures the epitome but misses everything else. I want a picture to reflect not only the forms, but [also] what I had seen and felt at the moment of exposure.^half-dozen

While Adams consort Stieglitz's emotional aesthetic, information technology would be a fault to link their photographic outlooks too closely. Adams, subsequently all, was nearly a one-half-century younger than Stieglitz and was deeply involved with the aesthetic and political trends of his own day. The most dominant aesthetic trend in photography betwixt 1925 and 1950 is the emergence of the ";documentary"; mode of expression. This is a make of often emotionally riveting photographic realism, which is perchance best illustrated by Dorothea Lange's well-known Migrant Mother (1936). The popularity of the documentary mode of expression during the 1930s and 1940s reflects, to a sure extent, the cynical public's want for direct, straightforward communication in the wake of the mid-1930s Dust Basin and the unsettling stock market crash of 1929. It can also be seen to record and celebrate the New Deal social programs, which were designed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's assistants to help alleviate the almost troubling conditions of the Great Depression.

It is noteworthy that Paul Strand was ane of the early practitioners of the documentary fashion. Strand studied photography under the tutelage of Lewis Hine, the well-known sociologist-turned-lensman. Hine'due south work for the National Child Labor Committee helped convince Congress to eradicate kid labor in the United States. In 1930, when Strand first met Adams, he was actively following Hine'southward atomic number 82, travelling through United mexican states making monumentalizing portraits of ordinary citizens he found on the streets. Projects like these, combined with Strand's outspoken advancement of America'due south continued friendship with the socialist block countries, brought Strand to the attention of anti-Communist Republicans in the U.S. Congress. Fearing that he might loose his correct to travel away, Strand entered into self-exile in France, in 1950. Adams, who wisely chose to keep his political views to himself during this time, withal connected to cite Strand as a pregnant influence on his work. In the waning years of his life, however, Adams became increasingly outspoken well-nigh his political views. In 1983, he told an interviewer:

I think at that place may be a revolution if there is non greater equality given to all citizens. We have consistently considered the employer, peculiarly the big corporations, as the most valuable office of the American order. We take consistently disregarded the enormous importance of the farmer, the technician, the educator, the creative person, [and] the laborer. I'one thousand not calling for a revolution; I'chiliad calling for greater equality to all citizens. If that doesn't happen, something volition.⁷

During the heyday of the documentary mode of photography, while other Americans were grooming their cameras on the disenfranchised and the eye class, Adams was defendant of photographing nada but trees, rocks and bushes. All the same it was during the early 1940s that Adams helped the Museum of Mod Art organize a juried exhibition of photographs chosen Images of Freedom that ";look[ed] at the people -150; our friends, our families, ourselves-133;. [It asked] what are our resources and our potential strength?";⁸ Ane photograph from this exhibition, Mrs. Gunn on Porch, Independence, California, 1944, suggests the kind of dignified epitome of the middle class that he must have had in mind. Similarly, ii years later he traveled to Owens Valley, California, to photograph the Japanese-Americans who had been forcibly relocated at that place post-obit the attack on Pearl Harbor. The resulting exhibition and volume entitled Born Free and Equal celebrated the prisoners that he met there and condemned the injustice of the army camp. The book'due south photographs affirm the individuality, nobility, work ethic, and Americanness of the internees while his accompanying texts draw the horrible conditions in the camps and plea passionately for other Americans to correct such civil rights violations. Adams'south determination to limited his condemnation of the relocation camps in words rather than images reflects his unwavering belief that the visual arts must never condemn life, only build it upward and celebrate information technology. Quoting Stieglitz, Adams frequently said, ";Art is the affirmation of life."; ⁹

Adams used a similar strategy of combining life-affirming photographs and critical prose in his efforts to preserve America's wilderness reserves, especially in and around Yosemite Valley. In 1934, he joined the Board of Directors of the Sierra Club and began lobbying Congress to stop logging and mining in the King's River Coulee, nigh Yosemite. By 1938, when he published his first book of mural photographs, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, he sent copies to President Roosevelt and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. The photographs in the book, he recalled, ";helped swing the stance in our favor."; 10 In 1940, with the President's help, the canyon became a national park.

Information technology is important to note, however, that Adams's advancement for the parks began only later he had created a substantial body of landscape photographs, works that were aimed at creative rather than for political ends. Looking back on the relationship between his photographs and his advocacy for the environs, he recalled:

I never did a photo of whatsoever importance for an environmental purpose - All the pictures I've done were done considering I was there and I loved the mountains and I visualized a motion picture. However, I exercise experience very adept about the fact that my photographs have been used in environmental campaigns a lot-133; The pictures of Kings Canyon Sierra, for instance, were done well earlier I became involved in the fight to establish Kings Canyon every bit a national park. ¹¹

Afterward playing a central role in establishing Kings Canyon National Park, Adams became widely regarded every bit the chief photographer of, and unofficial spokesman for, the National Park organisation. In 1941, the Department of the Interior commissioned him to create a photographic mural well-nigh the national parks. The commission was canceled because of Earth War II, yet Adams returned to the parks in 1946, 1948 and 1958 with funds provided past the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In subsequent years, he was invited to discuss American ecology policy with several Presidents, including Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and received from the latter the Presidential Medal of Freedom. By way of contrast, Adams conducted a state of war of words with President Reagan. He described Reagan'southward Secretarial assistant of the Interior James Watt's policy of allowing strip mining and timber harvesting in the national parks as an indefensible policy of ";rape, ruin and run!"; ¹²

Adams would certainly be unhappy with the over-popularity of America's National Parks today. In fact, he preferred the term ";reserve"; to ";park"; because the former term suggested that public lands should be ";open to the public and their cars (to a limited extent)"; but devoid of the human comforts and popular camping facilities that threaten their protection and preservation. thirteen ";There is certainly nothing amiss,"; he explained with camping, angling, boating, swimming, skiing, and all the other participation and non-participation sports; people practice non take enough of these healthful and refreshing experiences. But you do non play ping-pong in a cathedral, rustle popcorn at a cord-quartet concert, or hang billboards on the face of Half Dome in Yosemite (non all of us would, anyhow!). You must have certain noble areas of the world left in equally close-to-central status as possible. You must have quietness and a certain corporeality of solitude. You lot must be able to impact the living stone, drinkable the pure waters, scan the great vistas, sleep nether the stars and awaken to the cool dawn air current. Such experiences are the heritage of all people. ^xiv

Adam's ";pure"; images, technical accomplishments and disquisitional views about the environs are no less relevant today, 15 years after his expiry, than during his lifetime. At concluding count, the U.S. Forest Service had carved more than 378,000 miles of roads in America's forests, primarily to allow access for logging and mining. And in that location are plans to add 580,000 more. 15 Adams realized that America's national parks had been created past an human activity of Congress, and could be taken away. He also realized that the prints that he selected for this exhibition would travel throughout the state long afterwards his death and be seen by all. As a trunk of work, these prints illustrate Adams's concern that ";the dragons of demand have been kept at snarling distance past the St. Georges of conservation, but the menace remains. Only education tin can enlighten our people -150; didactics and its accompanying estimation, and the seeking of resonances of understanding in the contemplation of Nature.";¹⁶

Peter Barr is Assistant Professor of Art History and Klemm Gallery Director at Siena Heights Academy in Adrian, Michigan.

---

ⁱ I want to acknowledge and thank Kimberly Blessing and Kimberly Barr, who read earlier versions of this essay and made helpful comments.

^two Come across Patricia A. Johnson, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

^three I want to thank Deborah Danielson for explaining the intricacies of the Zone System to me.

^four For a discussion of Stieglitz'southward symbolist ideals, see Allan Sekula, ";On the Invention of Photographic Pregnant,"; Artforum 13:5 (January 1975), reprinted in Vicki Goldberg, Photography in Impress (Albuquerque: Academy of New Mexico Printing, 1981), 452-73.

⁵ ";Playboy Interview: Ansel Adams -150; aboveboard conversation,"; Playboy vol. 30, no. 5 (May 1983), 68.

^six Ibid., 68-9.

⁷ Ibid., 226.

⁸ Run into Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996), 171.

⁹ ";Playboy Interview,"; 68.

^x Ibid.

^xi Ibid., 86.

¹² ";Playboy Interview,"; 222.

¹³ Ansel Adams, The Role of the Creative person in Conservation (Berkeley, California: University of California Higher of Natural Resources, Department of Forestry & Conservation, March 3, 1975), 11.

^fourteen Ansel Adams, ";Give Nature Time,"; Occidental College Outset Address, June 11, 1967, with thank you to Leslie Calmes at the Center for Creative Photography, Tuscon Arizona, for sending me with this and other essays by Adams quoted in this newspaper.

^fifteen Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Wood (New York: Broadway Books, 1998).

^xvi Ansel Adams, ";A Photographer Talks About His Art,"; address to the Friends of Occidental Higher, Jan 22, 1969.

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Source: http://www2.housatonic.edu/artmuseum/anseladams/barressay.html