Focus on wild America

Adams’ photos impressive in print, stunning in person

Monolith, the Face of Half Dome was taken by Ansel Adams in 1927 at Yosemite National Park.
Monolith, the Face of Half Dome was taken by Ansel Adams in 1927 at Yosemite National Park.

Ansel Adams, the pioneering and brilliant photographer beloved for his spectacular Western landscapes, wanted to give people more than breathtaking beauty.

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Trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Pine Forest in Snow, photographed in 1933, hangs at the Arkansas Arts Center as part of an Ansel Adams exhibit.

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Trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is one of photographer Ansel Adams’ masterworks.

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Trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

White House Ruin, Morning, Canyon de Chelly captures an Anasazi ruin in Arizona. The 1949 photograph is part of “Ansel Adams: Early Works” at the Arkansas Arts Center.

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Ann Prentice Wagner, curator of drawings at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock

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Trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust/ANSEL ADAMS

Kearsarge Pinnacles, Southern Sierra, circa 1925

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AP

Ansel Adams laughs during a 1980 interview at his Carmel Highlands, Calif., home.

Instead of an image that looked exactly like something you could see, Adams wanted his photographs to convey more ... much more.

Exhibit

“Ansel Adams:

Early Works”

Friday-April 16, Arkansas Arts Center, Ninth and Commerce streets, Little Rock

Admission: free

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday

Organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. Arkansas sponsors are Philip R. Jonsson Foundation; Judy Fletcher; Holleman & Associates, P.A. and Barbara House.

“Herman Maril: The Strong Forms of Our Experience”

Friday-April 16

“Seeing the Essence: Photographs by William E. Davis”

Tuesday-April 16

Info: (501) 372-4000;

arkansasartscenter.…

"He wanted to give the viewer the emotional equivalent of his own experience; to feel what he felt and to see what he saw," says Ann Prentice Wagner, curator of drawings at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock.

While Adams' images have been continually reproduced as posters and prints and have been the subject of countless books, calendars, journals, postcards and more, there is no substitute for seeing the real thing.

Which brings us to "Ansel Adams: Early Works," which opens Friday at the Arts Center. The 41 images, from the 1920s into the 1950s, were not only taken by Adams but printed by him. These are small-scale prints ranging from his soft-focus, warm-toned 1920s work through the f/64 school of sharp-focused photography he co-founded with Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham in the 1930s and the cooler, high-contrast printing style that came after World War II.

Adams' work became, during the 1930s and 1940s, the very definition of the American West's wilderness.

"He crafted these objects," Wagner says. "It's important to see these in person, to see the photographs he made from the original negatives as opposed to the reproductions we often see. It is important for us to feel in touch, to get as close as we can, to the creative human being behind it. That's one of the most vital roles a museum plays."

The Adams show is one of three exhibitions opening this week at the Arts Center. Wagner is the originating curator for the other two: "Seeing the Essence: Photographs by William E. Davis" and "Herman Maril: The Strong Forms of Our Experience."

Wagner also wrote the catalog for the Maril exhibit, which was mounted by the University of Maryland Art Gallery. Maril was a respected modernist painter with strong roots in nature. Wagner says the three shows share a connection in spirit if not style.

The work of Davis, a Little Rock photographer whose later work was inspired by Adams and Edward Weston, is drawn from a bequest of some 700 prints from his estate. Davis, who died Feb. 13, was Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller's personal photographer, taught photography at the University of Arkansas Graduate Center and, with portrait photographer Greer Lyle, taught workshops.

But it is the photographs of Adams that are likely to be the big draw.

"He is the landscape photographer," Wagner says.

Adams also was a leader of the Sierra Club for decades; his first photographs to be published appeared in the club's newsletter in 1922. His first solo exhibition was in 1928 at the club's San Francisco headquarters. Adams made many trips to Washington to lobby for more national parks and preservation of wilderness areas. He was a powerful and persuasive personality, but his greatest eloquence emerged from behind the lens of a camera.

"He and Rachel Carson [Silent Spring] are responsible in many ways for the modern conservation movement," Wagner says.

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Adams, who died in 1984, was "slammed during the 1930s for not doing socially active photography like [his friend] Dorothea Lange did," Wagner says. "He felt that man's relationship to nature was of great social relevance. He felt we couldn't just pay attention just to humans, but to the whole world we are part of. Alfred Stieglitz and others in his circle had a hard time taking Adams seriously; to them, it was rocks and trees, which weren't profound."

Stieglitz, the New York-based photographer who operated the first modern art gallery in the country, was a driving force in making photography accepted as an art form. His "circle" included John Marin, Arthur Dove and, most famously, his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe.

Perhaps in response to the criticism, Adams photographed Japanese-Americans interned at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California. His images from the camp are generally considered undistinguished, lacking the intense emotional and spiritual power of his best landscape work.

But during his time there, Adams shot one of his classic images, Mount Williamson, from Manzanar. It also is in "Early Works."

Adams eventually won over his critics. In 1936, Stieglitz gave Adams a one-man show.

"Stieglitz would write to him, telling him 'This is some of the greatest photography I've ever seen,'" Wagner says.

Wagner sees Adams as a part of the modern art movement that Stieglitz and his circle embodied and defined.

"He is tremendously aware of the abstract qualities of what he's doing," Wagner says. The exhibit backs that viewpoint brilliantly with Frozen Lake and Cliffs, Sierra Nevada, California. Some regard the 1932 image as his most successful abstraction.

And there is more greatness in "Early Works."

Images from his 1927 portfolio of Yosemite National Park, "Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras," hang in the exhibition, including A Grove of Tamarack Pine. It was a painterly interpretation popular at the time, but the style -- Pictorialism -- would be abandoned by Adams as his style began to emerge.

For Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Adams picked a filter that would darken the sky and enhance the textures of the granite face.

"The red filter gave intensity and drama to the sky, which would help capture this powerful, spiritual experience he had in front of Half Dome," Wagner says.

The exhibit offers two versions of Monolith. Adams took the photograph in 1927. He printed it that year and reinterpreted it in 1940. The 1927 print is warmer and, at 18 inches by 14 inches, smaller than the one he made in 1940, which was 30 inches by 24 inches.

Adams, Wagner says, used visualization "so he knew what he was going after before he photographed it. It helped him know where he should be when he's photographing, what kind of filter, which camera, which lens, what time of day ... otherwise, you are taking a snapshot and simplistically reacting."

1941's Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico "is immortal," Wagner says. "It took a lot of work to get the work we see today. The negative has tones that are different; he had to dodge and burn various parts; he enhanced part of the negative and eventually figured it out. It could take hours and hours to make a print from that negative."

Other masterworks in the exhibit are 1949's White House Ruin, Morning, Canyon de Chelly and 1935's From Wawona Tunnel, Winter, Yosemite, which are as accessible as they are stunningly beautiful.

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As fans of his work likely know, Adams, who grew up in San Francisco, was planning a career as a concert pianist. As a rather sickly teenager, he started taking pictures at Yosemite in 1916 with a Kodak Brownie camera. He was disappointed with the images because they didn't carry the power of what he felt.

"So, he did a lot of research," Wagner says. "It took a tremendous amount of practice to get the technical ability to do what he wanted to do as a photographer."

In materials from exhibition organizer art2art Circulating Exhibitions, Adams is quoted as saying he sought to become "intimate with the spirit of wild places." As people responded to his images of Yosemite, he says, "My piano suffered a serious rival. ... I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!"

Adams' contributions to photography are immense. He is one of the founders of Aperture magazine, wrote numerous books on photographic techniques and led workshops and lectures around the country that were packed with people wanting to learn.

"I don't think he saw a line between art and life; to him, it was all the same," Wagner says. "That intensity of caring, seeing, awareness ... he would come from New York City and wonder how people could exist there. He would go to the beautiful places he loved." Particularly Yosemite, which he visited every year from 1916 until his death.

"He changed the way people looked at things," Wagner says. "Adams was always finding a new way to 'look.'"

Style on 01/22/2017

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