Ansel Adams DAI 1994 2014

ANSEL ADAMS

In 1992 I gave a talk at the Dayton Art Institute on the occasion of a substantial exhibition of the work of Ansel Adams.  The following text is an edited and revised version of those remarks.  

Ansel Adams was almost certainly the most widely known and most popular photographer in history.  I can’t think of anyone else whose name and work are more likely to be recognized, even by those who have little interest in the medium.  Adams is consistently identified as the greatest of photographers, the ultimate master, a man of legendary abilities and supreme vision.  Books, posters, note cards, calendars, galleries, and museums sustain a veritable industry of canonization. Devotees pay substantial sums to attend Adams-style workshops from Vermont to California.  The US government has officially named an Ansel Adams Wilderness Area near Yosemite and a lofty peak in the Sierra is now Mount Ansel Adams.

Any such adulation, no matter how well deserved, automatically invites a reaction.  Adams-bashing is a fairly popular indoor sport among those critics and photographers who object that such a monopoly of attention overlooks a huge amount of brilliant work that falls entirely outside the tradition that his classic photographs epitomize.

I see merit in both points of view, but the case for Adams’s greatness hardly needs further embellishment, and since I am always dubious of conventional wisdom, my appraisal tends to be slightly more critical than an unalloyed chorus of praise. Even so, I have enormous respect for Adams’s accomplishments and I think his exalted reputation has been legitimately earned.

In spite of having lived entirely within the 20th century, Adams was, in some important respects, a 19th century photographer.  His best-known pictures are firmly in the tradition of that century.  Although he repudiated his predecessors in the field of landscape photography, such as Bierstadt, for being “stagey,” his own pictures are hardly less calculated to evoke a sense of high drama.  Although Adams was rigorous in his insistence on using only purely photographic means, no one was more capable than he of exploiting those means to their very limits, and of using them to create visual theatrics.

Consider this thought: no painter, working during the same period in which Adams worked, would have been taken seriously had he or she produced work as clearly derived as Adams’s was from the traditions of naturalistic landscape painting of the 19th century.  To contemplate why a particular type of imagery is repudiated in one medium and celebrated in another is to open a whole array of interesting questions that are beyond the scope of this brief appraisal.

The primary goal of the photographic industry has always been to make the process of producing a picture as simple as possible.  The current apotheosis of this trend is, of course, the cameras built into smartphones and the ability of those devices to share images instantly with others equipped with similar devices.  If one is so inclined, however, one may choose to devote a lifetime to exploring infinite variables and fine points of photographic technique.

Adams was a diligent student and dedicated teacher of the applied science of photography.  He learned the intricacies of sensitometry in order to control with the greatest possible precision the tonal scale of photographic films and papers.  To the enormous benefit of countless photographers endowed with less ability and insufficient patience to grasp these mysteries, Adams codified his learning into a method he called the Zone System.  This prosaic name stands for a thoroughly articulated means of calculating and calibrating the variables of the photographic process (principally exposure and development), thus making it possible for the careful photographer to control and predict exactly what his/her results would be for any given situation.  The Zone System was the foundation for a series of instructive books Adams wrote, books that remained for many years the most important technical texts available for those intent on mastering photography.

Adams’s mastery of the technology of photography and his application of that skill to the creation of a grandiose vision of nature represented a quintessentially American sensibility.  There is in his work a quality of unambiguous moral certitude.  His landscape pictures are like a visual hymn to the belief in manifest destiny.  Adams’s vision of America has little to do with that of a city on a hill, but rather with the sanctity of the unencumbered hill itself.  It is interesting that the best-loved photographer in America has shown us the least evidence of our presence in the land.

Ansel Adams’s landscape photographs present us not so much with nature itself – which is what we would like to believe they do – as with the pure, distilled, formal essence of nature. Even in his portraits and commercial work, everything is frozen in an eternal moment of absolute perfection. That which is photographed is seen in a condition that is as near as possible to the platonic concept of ideal form.

The world we see in Adams’s photographs is emphatically not the ordinary world, as most of us know it.  Perhaps it is quotidian reality for a handful of forest rangers, but for the majority of us it is exotic and remote.  In this lies much of Adams’s appeal.  Most of us are ready and willing to be seduced into believing that photographs record reality with accuracy and neutrality.  We tend to overlook, often deliberately, distinctions between representation and expression, and between life and drama.  Thus the attraction of, soap operas as well as the photographs of Ansel Adams.

I conclude by noting some other currents in photography that were contemporaneous with the long and distinguished career of Ansel Adams.  In part I wish to make the point that it is absurd to suppose that photography can be adequately represented by one person’s work alone, even when that person is as eminent and influential as Ansel Adams. Photography, even in the rarified realm of so-called “fine art photography” has proliferated such a profusion of diverse and even contradictory viewpoints and practices that a single-track approach cannot be seriously entertained.

Consider these few photographers – not in any particular order, and few of them contemporary artists in 2014 – whose work provides some indication of the rich alternatives to Ansel Adams’s immaculate conceptions of nature:

Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee: each of them radically different from one another yet each producing work of the greatest importance in the study of vernacular American life, compassionate social documentary, and the private/public dramas of daily life in difficult times. Evans in particular provides exceptionally interesting opportunities for comparisons and contrasts.

Henri-Cartier Bresson, Andre Kertesz, W. Eugene Smith, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Joseph Koudelka: masters of the hand camera, the fleeting moment, the human tragedy and comedy of the streets, graceful, satirical, penetrating, visceral, and keenly intelligent.

Frederick Sommer, Harry Callahan, Minor White, and Aaron Siskind: a group as impossible to categorize as to overlook for their visual, intellectual, and spiritual intensity, for their different ways of transforming the most plainly direct seeing into the most illuminating metaphors.

Robert Adams, Joe Deal, and the rest of the New Topographics group, and the Rephotographic Survey collective: the most clearly defined exponents of a vision directly connected to the 19th century photographers of the American West, and hence to Ansel Adams, but with a strikingly different perspective on both the physical and the conceptual territory.

Robert Heinecken, Betty Hahn, John Wood, Jerry Uelsmann, and David Hockney: dissatisfied with the traditional restraints of the straight photograph and insistent on exercising the freedom to push the medium in unfamiliar directions.  These are just a few of those who have led the way towards the current condition of photography’s unbounded diversity of form and function in the visual arts.

The permutations of photography continue to evolve and many more names could be added to these lists, including countless artists who have arrived on the scene since the death of Adams in 1984.

That Ansel Adams was a truly great photographer, more widely known and more highly regarded than any other of his time, is beyond question.  But the medium is a vast land that includes innumerable and widely different realms, and no single figure or style dominates the entire territory.  So it is important to note that one of the many admirable attributes of Ansel Adams was his openness to the full spectrum of photography.  He believed in the value of diversity and even supported institutions that featured work of which he was outspokenly critical.  In my view, this openness of mind, this largeness of spirit, and this belief in the future marked him as a great man every bit as much as his remarkable photographs.

Sean Wilkinson
1992/2014