Ansel Adams’s America
Discussion through works of art encourage how to approach ambiguous and complex ideas, thoughts, and feelings. The MFAH offers a democratic space where students and teachers can develop, practice and articulate these habits of mind. Remember that the quality of the conversation is what is important, not finding the artist’s “answer.” Slow down and take the time to make careful observations. Talk about what you notice, and try to avoid jumping to conclusions and interpretations. Be sure to give enough time for silent looking and thinking.
Work of Art
Born to a wealthy San Francisco family, Ansel Adams divided his young adulthood between music as a career and photography as a hobby. Inspired by photographer Paul Strand’s modern style that capitalized on the camera’s ability to control sharpness, abstractness, and tonality, Adams eventually made a full time commitment to photography. In 1932, Adams and other San Francisco photographers founded GROUP f.64, an organization that promoted photography as an independent art medium. This kind of photography became known as “Straight” photography.
Adams’ participation in the acceptance of photography as a legitimate art medium did not end with his technical contributions. In 1940, Adams helped to institute the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, co-curating its first exhibition. With the prestigious museum’s support, Adams advanced photography to the status of fine art. Adams also established the Friends of Photography, an organization that sought to promote visual literacy through exhibitions and public workshops. Even after his death in 1984, the Friends of Photography has continued to operate the Ansel Adams Center for Photography in San Francisco.
Old Faithful Geyser is the most famous of the hundreds of geysers in Yellowstone National Park. It erupts for 1.5 to 5 minutes at intervals of between 35 minutes and two hours. It reaches heights of up to 180 feet, making it the largest predictable geyser in the park. “Old Faithful” was named by the Washburn Expedition of 1870 that explored the Yellowstone region in its prime and declared the area the nation’s first national park. The geyser is the most visited and most studied at Yellowstone.
Inspired by boyhood trips to Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks, Adams’s combined interest in environmental conservation and photography produced many scenic photographs of nature such as Old Faithful Geyser.
GROUP f.64 opposed traditional “pictorialist” photography that imitated Impressionist paintings and graphic arts. Pictorialist landscape photography typically produces soft-focus, manipulated prints, whereas Adams’s famous natural landscape photographs were done in sharp detail, with no alterations made to the negatives.
In addition, Adams developed a "zone system" to ensure complex, balanced, and appealing compositions. He mentally divided every photograph he took into multiple "zones", and ensured that a full range of tones--blacks, midtones, and whites--was represented in each zone. In this photograph, which is an excellent example of the zone system, one can see a wide range of tones, even in the white spray of water; nothing is overexposed or underexposed, and the photograph is detailed and complex.
In 1941, the National Park Service commissioned Ansel Adams to take photographs for a mural to be displayed at the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. When America entered World War II the following year, the project came to an end, but Adams continued to work in the western wilderness, producing many outstanding photographs.
Conversation
Subject Matter
Assessment
• Why did the National Park Service ask Adams to take pictures such as this? What purpose did they serve?
• Research other work by Ansel Adams. By comparing his landscape photographs, define Adams’s style. Did he enjoy taking images of the wilderness? What did he probably discover about the American wilderness? What was he trying to convey?
Resources
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