The essence of nature in black and white

[Copyright by the Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. All rights reserved.] Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, 1944. Ansel Adams photographed every national park except the Everglades during his lifetime. But Yosemite was the first one he saw, when he was 14 years old. Adams was an ardent conservationist, but his work increased tourism in the parks.

By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 30, 2002

Ansel Adams did not like to analyze his photographs, but his work showed that he understood better than most how to transform technology and creativity into an artistic partnership.

ST. PETERSBURG -- Looking at Ansel Adams' photographs, admiring their technical perfection and elegant composition, you can forget that photography was an artistic underdog when Adams was producing his finest work. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City was a lone voice of validation in 1940 when it established a department of photography, an example other museums didn't follow for years.

[Copyright by the Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. All rights reserved.] Grass in Rain, Glacier Bay National Monument, Alaska, 1948. The weather was cloudy and rainy during most of Adams’ visit to the park, so when he could not photograph his trademark heroic vistas, he turned his lens onto closer elements.

In the early years, DuBois often did not bring the work before the accessions committee, a group of knowledgeable museum members who had to approve everything that entered the permanent collection.

"There was the sense that it might be rejected," said chief curator Jennifer Hardin. "So a lot of it was here but not really, officially, here until the late '70s."

DuBois, now curator of decorative arts at the Arkansas Arts Center, chose well. With subsequent gifts, the collection has grown to include more than 1,000 images and is considered one of the finest in the southeastern United States.

Adams was an early advocate of DuBois' efforts, and donated three works to the museum in 1972. "If I can help in any way, please let me know," the master once wrote to him.

The works Adams donated, along with about two dozen others that are part of the collection are on long-term loan from members, line the walls of the Lorena C. Hannahs Gallery.

The small show illustrates the power and eloquence of nature, captured by Adams in black and white, and every shade between. Critics have said his work is unemotional, that he was too caught up in his Zone Theory, in which he divided light and shadow into tonal gradations.

This very technical process allowed him to visualize exactly what a print would look like before any exposures were made, so different from photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White, who made dozens of exposures at different settings to get the right one. But Adams' work is suffused with emotion, so much so that it would be sentimental and awkwardly didactic but for its complex composition and Adams' mastery of his medium.

Some artists spend a lifetime looking for their aesthetic lodestar. Adams found his when he was 14, on a family trip to Yosemite National Park, which he described as "a culmination of experience so intense as to be almost painful. Since that day . . . my life has been colored and modulated by the great earth gesture of the Sierra."

His parents gave him his first camera, a Kodak Brownie, to record his impressions on that trip, and he never stopped.

Morning Mist, Cascade Pass, Northern Cascades, Washington, 1958. Adams gave this photograph to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1972. In his youth, Adams trained to become a classical pianist before deciding to pursue photography. Of his art he said, “the negative is the composer’s score and the print its performance.” The rich range of tones in his work have been compared to a full scale of sound.

Some of his most famous images are in this show. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, for all its calculated artistry, is a meditation on the cycles of the earth. The moon comes up over the mountains, lit by the setting sun; everything is in crisp focus, including the cemetery crosses punctuating the darkening landscape.

Nature offered Adams personality enough as a subject; people rarely have a place in his work. Even animals are scarce. So the tiny horses in the foreground of Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine California, 1944, poised in a vast landscape that looks like abstract bands of light and dark, seem poignant and vulnerable.

An early, very famous photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, 1927, is not in this exhibition. But another exceptional photograph, Half Dome and Moon, 1960, captures the same sculptural beauty of the rock face, which Adams revisited over the years, setting up a kind of dialogue as he explored the ideas of permanence and mutability.

Adams did not like to analyze his photographs, but he did write, "Who can define the moods of the wild places, the meanings of nature in domains beyond those of material use? Here are the worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit."

Perception, revelation, science -- the hallmarks of photography -- are all here in the work of a man who understood better than most how to transform technology and creativity into an artful partnership.

-- Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com.

Review

"Ansel Adams: Nature and Art," at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, through Sept. 15. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $6 adults, $5 seniors, $2 children over 6. Free for younger children and members; free on Sunday. Call (727) 896-2667 or go to www.fine-arts.org.

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