Art and photography: history, theory, and practice

¶ … Ansel Adams: An Analysis of the Importance of America's Most Popular Photographer

Of all the great black-and-white photographers, Ansel Adams was the blackest and the whitest. -- Kenneth Brower, 2002

Today, Ansel Adams is widely regarded as the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century, and is perhaps the most best known and beloved photographer in the history of the United States. As a firm testament to his talents and innovations, the popularity of his work has only increased over the years following his death in 1984 (Szarkowski 1-2). This photographer's most important work concerned the last remaining vestiges of untouched wilderness in the nation, particularly in the national parks and other protected areas of the American West; in addition, Adams was an early and outspoken leader of the conservation movement (Szarkowski 2). This paper provides an overview of Adams and his historical significance, followed by a discussion of the medium he used and the time period in which he worked. An analysis of the historical and artistic influences on Adams is followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.

Review and Analysis.

Background and Overview. The superlatives simply fly when discussions of Ansel Adams are had; while the photographer had his critics, by and large, the American public loved the man and his work. "Anyone can understand the art of Ansel Adams," Brower notes, "whose images just knock one over. What role does that leave the critic?" (133). Anyone who has seen an Adams' photograph -- which is to say virtually everyone -- is immediately impressed with both the quality of the composition as well as the clarity of execution. According to Fischer (1996), "The photographs of Ansel Adams stress self-realization through identification with a natural setting" (365).

Historical Significance of Ansel Adams. Adams has left a profound legacy by generating continuing and renewed interest in the conservation of the wilderness areas of the United States, as well as introducing innovations into the field of nature photography. For example, in his essay, "Layers: Looking at Photography and Photoshop," Flagan (2002) points out that "anyone familiar with photography, and especially the large-format variety, will perhaps recognize immediate echoes of another process, another system, invented many years prior in the 1940s by Yosemite legend and modernist photographer extraordinaire, Ansel Adams" (10). The photographic process referred to here was the invention Adams called the Zone System. This technique was based on the principles of densitometry (the term is used here in relation to the optical density of photographic negatives and is usually referred to in previous studies as sensitometry); Adam's Zone System, developed in collaboration with Fred Archer in the early 1940s, is a method that permits a photographer to coordinate exposure readings with exposure and development controls based on a pre-visualization of the final photographic print (Flagan 11).

The first step involved in understanding and using Adams' Zone System involves a division of the continuous, analog grayscale of a photographic print into ten discrete units, or what Adams termed "zones." In order to maintain a separation of the zones from other measurements, such as exposure readings, Adams assigned them Roman numerals, thereby capturing the entire range of tones from of the deepest black (where all the silver in the paper has been exposed), to the brightest white (rendering nothing but the paper base), on a scale of 0-X (Flagan 11).

When taking photographs in the field, photographers using the Zone System would set up their equipment before the selected scene and perform a series of meter readings; the photographers would then envision what they would like the desired final print to look like and make the exposure accordingly. According to Flagan, exposures would normally be made for the deepest shadow area with detail, which would fall on Zone Ill in Adams's system, and then develop the negative with contraction or expansion of the highlight values, in essence controlling contrast through changes in development time. The photographic product that resulted, as Adams himself, noted, was not that much concerned with the "reality" of the scene: "Many consider my photographs to be in the 'realistic' category. Actually, what reality they have is in their optical-image accuracy; their values are definitely 'departures from reality'" (Adams cited in Flagan 11).

One of the more interesting and important aspects of this contribution is the manner in which it foresaw the introduction of digital photography in the closing days of the 20th century. In fact, following its introduction in 1941, Flagan suggests that it is impossible to exclusively consider photography an analog operation today since every photograph conceived using this system (and the author notes that there are many) was pre-visualized based on this table of ten discrete values. "It was composed and manufactured according to these ten units, and largely presented as the creative result of applying various zones to elements of the original scene," he says (Flagan 11).

Adams was also not above revising the various elements of his photographs in response to criticism; for example, according to Brower:

The public has always liked Ansel Adams, even if the critics have not. (This no doubt explains the sour opinion of many of the critics, e.g., 'Dirty snowdrift'?) In this 1978 McKinley, Adams simply darkened the shadows on the peak but not beyond the tonal range the eye accepts. I confess that the print is a little dark for my taste (I prefer intermediate prints I have seen of this image), but it is within the realm. These are McKinley shadows as one might perceive them at dawn from Wonder Lake. The 1978 print is not just more dramatic; it also conveys more information. Adams's darkening of shadows accentuates the topography of the mountain, sharpening the knife-edge ridges, bringing out the massif's third dimension. (133)

The relevance and importance of Adams' work can also be seen today from the popularity of his photographs that toured the country on his 100-year anniversary in 2002; further, Adams' photographs are widely regarded as being "the most natural and timeless there is, both in terms of subject matter, which helped spawn the National Park system, and interpretive vision, expressively channeled as an inner, personal style" (Flagan 12). Likewise, Brower (2002) enthuses that as far back as 1955, Adams "was even then recognized as the foremost landscape photographer on earth" (132). Such praise is not without foundation, certainly. For example, Adams was an early proponent of achieving maximum optical clarity through his association with the f-64 group (f-64 being the smallest available aperture, which provides the largest depth of field), and advanced the lens-based component of photography to its sharpest and clearest rendering to date, thereby ensuring that everything from near to far in his photographs was resolved with the same crisp, distinct details (Flagan 12).

The importance of this approach to contemporary photographers cannot be overstated and remains a vital component of his legacy. According to Flagan, Adams was the first photographer to take landscape images and reduce them into their respective visual components using his Zone System. This approach seemed to be the catalyst that moved the medium of photography from the realm of merely reproducing what the camera saw to one where the photographer became the composer as well. In this regard, Flagan notes that with Adams' Zone System, individual values were complemented "without risk of retracing the Pictorialist's penchant for broad painterly strokes. But consider also that there is no detail without value. Every object in a photograph is composed of contrasting changes in tone: optics simply enhance their borders, just like an aperture makes any differentiation possible" (12).

Therein clearly laid the genius of Adams: "Without these gradations, photography is only light-sensitive materials responding to an absence or excess of light, with all the gray values, divisible to infinity, of the Zone System found in between" (Flagan 12). These gradations are clearly visible in Adams' work, "Moon and Half Dome," for example, shown in Figure 1, and his "Trees, Stump, and Mist, Northern Cascades," shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 1. "Moon and Half Dome," Ansel Adams, gelatin silver photograph, image size approximately 8'x10."

Source: The Ansel Adams Gallery 2005.

Figure 2. Trees, Stump, and Mist, Northern Cascades, Ansel Adams, gelatin silver photograph.

Source: The Ansel Adams Gallery 2005.

In his essay, "From Aesthetic Education to Environmental Aesthetics," Fischer (1996) suggests that it was this ability to switch back and forth "from environmental the aesthetic criteria of value [that] led Adams to a photographic style which recalls the great stylists among realist painters of nineteenth-century America" (366). Likewise, an environmentalist, William Turnage, believed that there was a clear association between Adams and the Rocky Mountain and Hudson River schools of landscape painting, a connection that was further supported by the observation of photography critic John Szarkowski who stated:

Adams' photographs are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition. . . . It does not seem likely that a photographer of the future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust and belief that Adams has brought to it (cited in Fischer 366).

Another of Adams initiatives in the conservation and innovations in the photographic realm that has left an enduring legacy was San Francisco's "The Friends of Photography," including its Ansel Adams Center; unfortunately, the center was forced to close on October 31, 2001 as the result of a downturn in the national economy. A report in Afterimage noted that The Friends of Photography group was founded by Adams and several of his colleagues (including Brett Weston and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall) in Carmel, California in 1967; in 1989, The Friends moved its location to the South of Market/Yerba Buena district of San Francisco, the first non-profit arts organization to do so and in January 2001, The Friends moved to a new location on Mission Street near San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art (The Friends of Photography Closes 2). According to this report, over the years, this major photographic organization has launched hundreds of exhibitions and produced more than 70 major catalogs, monographs and anthologies, firmly establishing itself as a premier venue for fine art photography (The Friends of Photography Closes 2).

In addition, the 2000-member organization's mandate included providing public workshops and an active educational program for members of the community, including school children and seniors (The Friends of Photography Closes 2). A press release cited the organization's closure as being the result of "a series of challenges not the least of which has been the difficulty of operating a non-profit arts institution in today's economic climate"; The Friends also experienced monetary losses during an extensive renovation period and was faced with increasing operating costs, including exorbitant rents, a continuing problem noted by the group (The Friends of Photography Closes 2).

The president of the group's board characterized the organization's closure as follows: "It's ironic that this turn of events coincides with the great success of the centenary exhibition 'Ansel Adams at 100'"; the closure also follows a successful showing of the exhibition "Ansel Adams, A Legacy," which was on tour for four years and was seen by a half a million people around the world (The Friends of Photography Closes 2). The Friends' extensive holdings of American art and the group's archives have since been transferred to other organizations in the area, but the organization's bookstore remained under private ownership (The Friends of Photography Closes 2). One of the exhibitions that had been featured at the center included one photograph from Adams's "Manzanar" series (1943-44), described by Lerner as "an anonymous 1942 image of the F.B.I. searching a Japanese-American family's house for evidence of subversion, and a 1945 group portrait of second-generation Japanese-American women in the military stationed at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, who were permitted to leave the World War II-era internment camps to enlist" (13).

According to the Jan Grenci of the Library of Congress, Adams began taking these pictures in 1942 at the Manzanar War Relocation Center; the project was the concept of the Relocation Center's director, and Adam's friend and fellow Sierra Club member, Ralph Merritt. Grenci writes that:

Adams wanted to contribute to the war effort while at the same time show the loyalty of the Japanese-Americans interned at Manzanar, located in Inyo County, California, approximately 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. In 1944, some of these images were published in Adams' book Born Free and Equal. The book had a limited circulation, perhaps due to the political climate of war-time America. When offering the collection to the Library, Adams said in a letter, 'All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use... The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and despair by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment.'" (3).

Adams took hundreds of pictures of the daily routine in the camp, including pictures of Japanese internees repairing tractors, working in various shops and even playing bridge. At least one observer today suggests that there was an ulterior motive to the government's desire for Adams to complete this project. For example, one of the government propaganda images from the Manzanar camp series portrays a young woman sewing a U.S. flag; the interpretive curatorial statement asks the viewer if this activity should be regarded as "proving her loyalty to a doubting government" or, in the alternative, it was her being "forced to sew a flag for the government that imprisons her" (Lerner 13). A similar photograph from the Manzanar camp series is shown in Figure 3 below:

Figure 3. Black-and-white photograph, Ansel Adams, "Sumiko Shigematsu, foreman of power sewing machine girls," Manzanar Camp Series.

Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 2005

Today, as the United States prosecutes an increasingly costly war on terrorism at home and abroad, these compelling images are all the more timely today. In this regard, Lerner suggests that the Japanese internment camps that were represented in these provocative images by Adams means that some Americans will always be considered as hostile foreigners even if they are natural born citizens generations removed from their immigrant ancestors, primarily as a result of their ethnicity, skin color or national origin (Lerner 13).

Medium Used by Adams. Ansel Adams used black-and-white (and later color) photography almost exclusively in creating his photographic compositions, although he used it in ways that were unprecedented; he also wrote extensively about his experiences and his thoughts concerning his innovative techniques.

For example, in his chapter, "The Artist and the Ideals of Wilderness" Adams (1961) states that:

It is my intention to suggest the relationship of wilderness to some contemporary definitions of art and the relationship of art to contemporary concepts of wilderness, and to hint at the relationship of both to the citizens of our time and of the future. That's a very big order. I shall naturally stress my own art medium, which is photography, and will attempt some rationale of purpose and realization in that domain. (49)

According to Szarkowski (2005), by 1935, Adams was enjoying a high degree of popularity among the American photographic community, based in large part on a series of articles that were written for the popular photography press, particularly "Camera Craft"; although this series of articles were mostly technical in nature, they served to draw attention to the practical problems associated with the medium of photography. In fact, this biographer suggests that it was most likely this series of articles that caused Studio Publications (London) to commission Adams to create Making a Photograph (1935). This influential book was a guide to photographic techniques that was illustrated mostly with Adams' own photographs; the book was an enormous success, due in part to the remarkable quality of its letterpress reproductions, which were printed separately from the text and tipped into the book page. In this regard, Szarkowski notes that, "These reproductions were so good that they were often mistaken for original (chemical) prints" (4).

Despite being in black and white, many of Adams' photographs still managed to capture the essence of color and communicate it to the viewer. For example, his work, "Nevada Fall Rainbow," shown in Figure 4 below, is in stark black and white but Adams still succeeds in engaging the viewer to make a rainbow appear:

Figure 4. "Nevada Fall Rainbow," Ansel Adams, gelatin silver photograph, 10" x 8" contact print.

Source: The Ansel Adams Gallery 2005.

Time Period Covered by Adams' Work. Adams received his first camera in 1916 when he was just 14 years old. Although he was interested in the piano during this early period of his life and was quite accomplished (in fact, becoming a pianist was his intended profession until 1920), Adam's interest in photography eventually subsumed everything else until his death in 1984 (Turnage 2; Szarkowski 2005:2). The shift from his love of music to that of photography did not take place overnight, though, and Adams apparently never completely lost his taste for music, though, and as late as 1945, he recorded his interpretations of Beethoven, Chopin, and maybe others (Szarkowski 2005:3).

Historical and Artistic Influences on Adams. According to the official Ansel Adams Web site, Adams was an only child who grew up amid the natural splendors of early-day California. "The most important result of Adams's somewhat solitary and unmistakably different childhood," it says, "was the joy that he found in nature, as evidenced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden Gate. Nearly every day found him hiking the dunes or meandering along Lobos Creek, down to Baker Beach, or out to the very edge of the American continent" (Turnage 2).

The Sierra Club was an important component of Adams's early success as a photographer; in fact, the first published photographs and writings from the photographer appeared in the club's 1922 Bulletin, and the club sponsored his first one-man exhibition in 1928 at their San Francisco headquarters (Turnage 2). One of the most influential events during this period in Adams' life was his 1927 "High Trip" with the Sierra Club where he completed his first fully visualized photograph, "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome," shown in Figure 5 below.

Figure 5. "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome," 1927, Ansel Adams, gelatin silver photograph.

Source: The Ansel Adams Gallery 2005.

The so-called "High Trips" were month-long expeditions sponsored by the Sierra Club, generally to the Sierra Nevadas. According to Turnage, the groups were comprised of up to 200 members and:

The participants hiked each day to a new and beautiful campsite accompanied by a large contingent of pack mules, packers, cooks, and the like. As photographer of these outings, in the late 1920s, Adams began to realize that he could earn enough to survive -- indeed, that he was far more likely to prosper as a photographer than as a concert pianist. By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club" board of directors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite (Turnage 3).