Here are Ansel Adams’ favorite Ansel Adams shots.
Whether one chooses the memorable rock face of Half Dome at Yosemite National Park or the weird formations at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico’s Sangre de Christo Mountains, everyone seems to have an Ansel Adams photograph that he or she likes best.
Adams, who died in 1984 at 82, had his preferences too.
Unlike most artists, whose creative legacies are all too often shaped and selected by museum scholars and gallery directors, Adams was able at the end of his life to gather what he considered his best and most representative work into an exhibition.
Called “Ansel Adams: A Legacy,” and never made available to the U.S. before, it’s on view through March 29 at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art before traveling elsewhere.
Amazingly, the 115 images are not only of mountains and deserts, but include lots of people and city streetsy.
“Adams did not want to be known only as a landscape photographer,” said Merry Foresta, senior curator of photography for the museum.
These are not just favorite pictures, but they are printed as he exactingly desired, and include many that had been overlooked or ignored because they conflicted with his image and appeal as a landscape photographer.
According to Foresta, they are his antidote to a huge 1979 exhibition of his work at New York’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art. Called “Ansel Adams and the West,” it focused almost entirely on his mountains and wilderness images.
“He was made to be a landscape photographer of the West,” said Foresta. “He considered himself more than that, and so he picked his own show. He added not only grand views of the West, but the details of nature, more abstract looking pictures, portraits, city scapes.”
Oddly enough, this Adams exhibition of Adams was created for the people of Shanghai as part of a San Francisco/Shanghai cultural exchange in the early 1980s, when China was beginning to open up to the U.S.
The pictures then came back to the Friends of Photography Collection in San Francisco, which Adams founded, where they remained following his death.
But now, a decade and a half later, they’re at last touring the U.S. as “Ansel Adams: A Legacy.” After leaving the Smithsonian in March, the show will be at the Tampa Museum of Art April 21 through June 14 and the Ft. Wayne Museum of Art next Dec. 4 through Feb. 14, 1999.
Many of Adams’ personal favorites, of course, are among the works so cherished by environmentalists and conservationists — and people who just love the West.
Such Adams classics as “Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park” and “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” are among them. So are “Aspens, Northern New Mexico,” “Sand Bar, Rio Grande, Big Bend National Park, Texas” and “The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.”
But the prints are of his own late-in-life handicraft, somewhat darker in tone but showing far more contrast than those the public is accustomed to seeing.
“His visual acuity changed in later life and he made these prints accordingly,” Foresta said.
As is not too commonly known, Adams was also a gifted portrait photographer. His pictures of his good friend and fellow artist Georgia O’Keeffe, taken just as she was reaching the height of her fame, show a much warmer and even friskier woman than that depicted in the ethereal images produced by her photographer husband, Alfred Stieglitz.
“One in particular shows Georgia very relaxed,” Foresta said. “It speaks to their friendship. It’s a real snapshot, and not the way he usually worked. He had a camera with him, and grabbed it.”
Adams also produced compelling pictures of Native Americans and Spanish-American inhabitants of the West and Southwest, as well as other friends, such as fellow photographers Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston.
Another unexpected treat here is a very Weston-like “Surf Sequence” series of five Adams’ photos of the edge of the sea, shot almost straight down from a cliff in San Mateo County, Calif.
Unlike the purist Weston, who used large, wooden-sided box cameras all his life, and didn’t turn to color until well into middle age, Adams was always seeking and using new technology, Foresta said.
“He used a deep focus view camera for much of his work,” she said, “and did a lot of work with Edward Land of Polaroid. If Adams were alive today, he probably would be experimenting with digital cameras.”
The urban scenes in the collection are largely of Adams’ beloved San Francisco (in the days before its landscape became hideously marred by New York-style high rises). He was born there in 1902 and practiced photography at any early age visually exploring his neighborhood along San Francisco Bay.
These city pictures tend to gravitate to such focal points as the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, but how could anything taken from a Bay area hilltop not?
The one large body of Adams’ work the artist chose not to include is an assemblage of pictures he took as a documentary study of the internment camp at Manzanar, Calif., used to imprison Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Adams intended the pictures to perform the same polemical story-telling role as Lange’s photographs of victims of the Great Depression.
“But he thought them something of a failure,” Foresta said. “He thought that they did not have the power to move people and interpret the subject the way Lange’s and Walker Evans’ Depression pictures did. They were quite literal; not metaphorical enough.”
Instead, though taken from the grounds of the internment camp, the one Manzanar image Adams did put in this collection is of California’s Mt. Williamson.
Sometimes, it’s hard not to be a landscape photographer.
