The Earth: Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams. Old Faithful Geyser, Late Evening. Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. 1942 14 x 11 inch gelatin silver print, used by permission of Danziger Gallery
Written by George Russell
Coming of age during the emergence of the National Park Services, Ansel Adams was a lifelong member of the Sierra Club, founded by the conservation advocate John Muir. Adams’ photography is inseparable from his own advocacy on behalf of natural preservation—each shot seems to be a plea to the viewer to recognize the transcendent beauty that Adams saw in the rugged expanses of the west.
Ansel Adams Yellowstone Falls, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. 1942 10 x 8 inch gelatin silver print used by permission of Danziger Gallery
With roots in the pictorialist movement, which hewed to the formal and aesthetic considerations of landscape painting, Adams’ practices were strikingly modern despite his traditional subject matter—he pioneered the groundbreaking zone system, a scientific technique of exposing and developing film which allowed for a wide and dramatic tonal range even in extreme and difficult lighting conditions. Apparent in much of Adams’ work is the value placed on subtle abstraction and fragmentation—a sensibility notably shared by his friend and contemporary Georgia O’Keeffe—evidenced by his use of contrasting planes of black and white, and cropped frames highlighting texture and form over traditional composition.
Ansel Adams Aspens. Northern New Mexico. 1958 16 x 20 inch gelatin silver print used by permission of Danziger Gallery
The craggy mountains of “Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California” dwarf the trees and grazing animals in the foreground. Between its composition and the effect of pushing tonal range to its limits—rendering impossibly inky black shadows and gleaming highlights—the photo’s abstraction replicates the reeling mind’s attempt to absorb the sublime vastness of the stunning landscape. Hulking megaliths along with the forests and fields around them are collapsed into a two-dimensional plane in a study of light, value, and flattened form. The result is a deeply personal, subjective view of nature. They show the world as Adams saw it—shots that he “visualized” before taking, adjusting his exposure to capture an ideal vision—his impression of the view.
Ansel Adams Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine. 1944. 16 x 20 inch gelatin silver print used by permission of Danziger Gallery
Influenced by a romantic conception of nature as something which could be experienced uniquely and “communed with” on a personal level, Adams’ work no doubt perpetuated this notion. His images show nature in sultry nudes, private and sensual, many as phallic as O’Keeffe’s watercolors are vaginal—a photographic challenge to the staid parlor portraits of the long-tailed Hudson River School. Adams’ intimate portraits of nature as piously adored lover, though bereft of human subjects and often abstract, are deeply humanist in the way that they convey lived experience.
Ansel Adams Aspens. Rear of Church, Cordova, New Mexico. 1938 16 x 20 inch gelatin silver print used by permission of Danziger Gallery
The working class and the global south, it is said, will bear the brunt of climate change related disasters, drought, and famine, along with pollution-related health hazards. Adams knew, or intuited, the important link between the degradation of nature and social issues, or at the very least his overlapping treatments of humanity and nature prefigured our contemporary understanding of their interdependence. His images of interned Japanese Americans during World War Two are journalistic, social advocacy-oriented art that jarringly juxtaposed the soaring mountaintops, often used by others as a symbol of American greatness, and the shameful subjugation of ethnic minorities. Adams’ work is again political, for different reasons than before, but nonetheless—it is a love letter to a world slipping away, now with dire consequences for those least equipped to respond to them. Adams makes the sublime in nature human and the human personal, appealing for the safety and dignity of both.
Ansel Adams Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. 1941 37 x 46 inch collotype used by permission of Danziger Gallery
