"White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, 1942" by Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams: A Legacy "Ansel Adams: A Legacy" displays the artist’s greatest photographs of the American West.
by James D. Watts Jr.
The photographs Ansel Adams made of the American West are some of the most familiar and recognizable images of the 20th century.
The art of Ansel Adams, however, is something that can only be appreciated by coming face to face with the actual prints Adams made.
"I have to confess, I thought I knew Adams' work pretty well until I started working on this show," said David Newell, curator of exhibitions at Gilcrease Museum. "But once I saw the prints themselves, it was like being totally reintroduced to Adams as an artist.
"You realize what an extraordinary eye he had -- for composition, for detail -- and that he had that from the very beginning."
More than 130 of Adams' greatest photographs will go on display at Gilcrease, when the museum opens "Ansel Adams: A Legacy."
The works in the show are a collection of photographic prints Adams made late in his life from negatives that spanned his career. He created these prints for the Friends of Photography, a nonprofit organization that Adams and a number of other artists founded in 1967.
The Friends of Photography ceased operation in 2001, and the Adams collection was bought by Lynn and Tom Meredith, a couple from Austin, Texas. The exhibit that comes to Gilcrease has been touring for two years.
"This is a significant collection, because these were the prints that Adams himself selected to be representative of his work," Newell said. "All the images have been printed before, but even the most familiar images look a little different, because of the way Adams printed them for this collection."
The show also demonstrates the range of subjects Adams photographed. He is world-famous for his dramatic and haunting landscapes of the American West -- in particular, the regions of Yosemite National Park and New Mexico -- but Adams also created stunning still-life and portrait photographs.
One image Newell finds particularly impressive is a photograph of three eggs in an oval bowl on a rectangular tray. The texture of the print makes one almost think it is a photo-realist drawing in pencil or charcoal.
"But it's also an incredibly complex composition," Newell said. "The way the tray echoes the frame of the image, the oval of the bowl echoes the shape of the eggs, a shape that's repeated with the shadows cast by the eggs -- it just goes on and on like that.
"It shows Adams' mastery of composition, which makes his landscape photography all the more remarkable," he said. "He didn't crop his images. Instead, Adams would pre-visualize the image he wanted -- not just the subject matter, but the composition, the lighting, how it would be printed. He was always looking beyond simply taking the picture."
The way Gilcrease is presenting this exhibit will give visitors the chance to try their hand at duplicating Adams' work. One gallery will focus on the technical aspects of Adams' work, and will include a setup with a digital camera and printer, lights and a still-life scene arranged to mimic one of Adams' own photographs.
"Visitors can play with aperture and light settings, to see if they can re-create the look of an Adams photograph," Newell said. "And while the exhibit itself is geared for an adult audience, our education department is doing a great job of repackaging the information to make this show just as accessible and appealing to younger audiences."
The icons
The exhibit will begin with an introductory gallery that includes one of Adams' first iconic images -- "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927."
"That was the first image when everything sort of came together for him," Newell said.
The next gallery contains works from the early 1930s, when Adams made the decision to pursue photography rather than music as a career, and when he began to focus on landscape photography -- a subject matter that, at that time, was uniquely his.
Subsequent galleries focus on Adams' friends and colleagues (and show him to be equally accomplished as a portrait photographer) and his feverish productivity during the 1930s and '40s, when he was dividing his efforts between commercial work to support his family and his art, which includes "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941," one of the most famous photographs ever taken.
The final galleries contain the work that Adams did in the 1950s, when grants allowed him to pursue his fine art photography more vigorously, and the "legacy" prints he made during the last decade of his life, from his retirement from taking new commissions in 1972 to his death in 1984.
Having this show at Gilcrease is appropriate for several reasons. Adams' work at bringing the American West landscape to the general public mirrors the work that Thomas Moran did in the 19th century, creating paintings that brought the majesty of Yellowstone to the rest of the country.
It's also appropriate because photography is one of those areas in which Gilcrease in lacking.
"We follow the guidelines set down by Thomas Gilcrease," Newell said. "He collected paintings and sculptures and works on paper, anthropological works and documents. Photography wasn't one of his real interests, so we have very little in our collection.
"That is why we like to have shows of fine art photography, because it helps to fill that gap," he said. "And photography as art is rarely as sublime as it is with Ansel Adams' work. I said to some of the docents the other day that I wish our reality was what is in these photographs. If we all could see the world as Ansel Adams did imagine how beautiful that would be."
