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Published 24/07/02
Ansel Adams at 100
Hayward Gallery, London, from 11 July to 22 September 2002.
Ansel Adams’ images are as fundamental to
the narrative of the American West as the films of John Ford or
the legends of Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday. His
photographs demonstrate an obsession with nature — immense,
primitive, unsullied by human activity — but the way he portrays
stark mountains and brutal cliffs echo, consciously, the man-made
canyons and concrete peaks of New York and Chicago. No big city
apartment is complete without a framed Ansel Adams poster for the
residents to marvel at the moon they see from their windows casting
shadows from skyscrapers in imitation of the silhouettes of the
Rocky Mountains.
The ubiquity of Adams reproductions in the United States —
on everything from diaries, calendars, postcards, refrigerator magnets
and chocolate boxes — and his sheer popularity has lead to
his downgrading by many critics. So too, his concentration on nature,
rather than people makes his work ‘empty of political content’
unlike American photographers of the following generation (Frank,
Klein, Arbus) and the photojournalists who took centre-stage during
the Second World War and its aftermath.
‘Ansel Adams at 100’, celebrating the centenary of Adams’
birth, provides an opportunity for critical reappraisal and to view
a large variety (over 100) of full-sized, original prints, rather
than the few, small, badly reproduced images that may have become
hackneyed through over-exposure (in every sense of the word). The
exhibition reminds us that Adams was not just a perfectionist, but
an important technical pioneer.
He took his first photographs at the age of 14, with a Kodak Box
Brownie camera, while on holiday in Yosemite in 1916. He was immediately
obsessed, with both the place and the art; he set about educating
himself about the science of photography, theory and practice, which
he mastered and began to revolutionise by his early 20s.
His first steps as a serious photographer were influenced by the
Impressionists. For a short period he emulated the ‘pictorialists,’
photographers who used soft-focus, misty effects, often achieved
in the darkroom. These early works are surprising, very different
in style from those for which he is best known; they are rarely
seen but are important in understanding his evolution as an artist.
Under the influence of another photographic pioneer, Paul Strand,
he discovered that he could capture vast landscapes while preserving
crisp detail and, in fact, the monumentality of his subject could
actually be enhanced by fine focus and sharp contrast. An early
breakthrough, in 1927, became one of his most famous images —
‘Monolith, The Face of Half-Dome’, for which he
used a dark red filter and an exposure 16 times longer than his
previous attempt. When developing the plate, he realised he had
finally preserved what he had seen — visually and emotionally.
With Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and others he founded ‘Group
f/64’ -- f/64 being the aperture that achieves the greatest
depth of field and clarity of focus. He developed the ‘zone
system’, controlling the tone of different portions of the
image by manipulating exposure of the negative and development of
the print. The apparent simplicity and purity of his images began
to belie the complexity of the techniques used to achieve them and
his output often fell to less than a dozen works a year.
His most famous and widely reproduced image is ‘Moonrise,
Hernandez, New Mexico.’ Its familiar, final appearance
is very different from the contact print and illustrates, very well,
the care and precision of Adams’ darkroom work. A layer of
thin, white clouds at the top of the picture has been eliminated;
the moon is burned-in to emphasize the contrast with the lower cloud
layers; the profile of the distant mountains is given extra exposure
to provide clearer delineation; and the foreground trees have been
also treated to a longer exposure to create density and texture.
Adams frequently reprinted and reinterpreted his negatives. The
exhibition includes two prints from the negative of ‘Aspens,
Northern New Mexico’ made 20 years apart; they demonstrate
how his early delicate and subtle style became bolder and melodramatic
as he aged. The later print could have been taken on a very different
day — it is flooded with light, bold with highlights and contrasts.
All his great photographs are here, as well as ‘Moonrise’,
‘Half Dome’ and the ‘Aspens’, there
is El Capitain’and’Mt Robson’; as well
as a series of less familiar, more intimate images of individual
trees, stumps, leaves on water and grasses.
Standing a few feet from the large-scale original prints, even
he most familiar images have a stunning immediacy. A professional
photographer who viewed the exhibition alongside me expected to
confirm his opinion that Adams is ‘banal and clichéd’.
Instead he was made ‘sick with jealousy’ at the vitality
of images created over 70 years ago, with relatively simple technology,
and was stunned that he could have such an emotional response to
photographs that did not rely on suffering humanity as a subject.
Robert Johnston
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