'Ansel Adams in Our Time' Review: Reconsidering a Mountainous Career
'Ansel Adams in Our Time' Review: Reconsidering a Mountainous Career
To express admiration for Ansel Adams (1902-1984) in art journals of avant-garde opinion has for many years been totally uncool. Even before the 1970s, younger landscape photographers, resentful of the gigantic shadow he cast, were less apt to emulate the tonal virtuosity of his black-and-white prints than to make pictures that mocked his Edenic views of the American West and stentorian visual rhetoric.
The splendid exhibition “Ansel Adams in Our Time” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, may help to alter ingrained attitudes. Presented here as a photographer with pictorial and social interests that extended far beyond the mountains and forests of Yosemite Valley, he also stands forth as a landmark whom artists still reckon with, consciously or not.
In organizing the show, Karen Haas, curator of photographs, has selected roughly 100 prints by Adams and paired them with an equal number by 30 other photographers. Among this group are 19th-century predecessors Carleton E. Watkins, Eadweard J. Muybridge, Timothy O’Sullivan, and more than 20 living artists, including Richard Misrach, Mark C. Klett, Byron Wolfe, Lois Conner, Mitch Epstein, Catherine Opie, Trevor Paglen and Will Wilson. Different eras and sensibilities intermingle in eight spacious galleries.
The exhibition is stocked with many of Adams’s most popular images. The first room has two versions of “Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park” (one toned in selenium, both from about 1937) as well as “Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park” (1960).
Ansel Adams’s ‘Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park’ (about 1937)
Photo:
© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
But the modest dimensions of most prints in the show—the majority chosen from more than 450 given to the museum by William H. and Saundra B. Lane—signal that Ms. Haas prefers Adams the chamber player to the Romantic symphonist, who late in life made photographic murals of his greatest hits.
Early rooms trace his conversion from soft-focus Pictorialist to hard-edged Modernist, fueled by a precocious entrepreneurial spirit. He joined the Sierra Club at age 17 and began to organize its treks, after which he sold photographs of these rustic outings to members. In a wall of these prints from 1923-27—views of glaciers and waterfalls—one can already glimpse the mature Adams.
Abelardo Morell’s ‘Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Mount Moran and the Snake River From Oxbow Bend, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming’ (2011)
Photo:
Abelardo Morell/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In the 1930s, while honing his vision of American wilderness, he documented the scars of the Depression on his native San Francisco. A room of photographs made in the Southwest, which he first visited in 1927, reveals his eagerness to excise from the frame what he didn’t like about reality. He took up the cause of preserving the ritual dances of the Pueblo Indians with his camera but didn’t want his pictures to show the crowds of tourists watching—so he cropped them out.
Sections in the show on Adams’s activity in the National Parks and more forlorn areas of California (Death Valley and Owens Valley) emphasize the struggles of some younger artists to mitigate his dominant influence on their efforts at photographing the American West in the 21st century.
Ms. Opie (b. 1961) wants to “de-cliché” the rocky profile of Yosemite and finds a solution in blurry color abstractions. David Benjamin Sherry (b. 1981), a gay man, places monochromatic filters on his view camera in an attempt to “queer” the familiar “straight” view of Monument Valley, Ariz.
Abelardo Morell (b. 1948) seems less conflicted about Adams, which may be why the impressionistic complexity of his camera obscura views—done in a portable tent—of Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park and of Mount Moran in Grand Teton National Park feels more resolved.
Ansel Adams’s ‘Grass and Burned Stump, Sierra Nevada, California’ (1935)
Photo:
© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Many photographers with higher profiles (Thomas Struth, Robert Adams) qualify to be in this show. One of its striking features, however, is the space afforded local professionals. Sharon Harper, Laura McPhee, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Mr. Morell and Stephen Tourlentes either live or teach in the Boston area, and all prove themselves deserving.
Mr. Tourlentes (b. 1959) has photographed American prisons from afar at night for more than 20 years. The glow emanating on the horizon from these fortresses—built in depopulated regions of Wyoming and Colorado—is both chilling and sublime.
That governments often isolate prisoners in uninhabited landscapes would not have been a surprise to Adams. In 1943-44, he photographed Manzanar, Calif., one of the camps where FDR interned citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Five prints from that series, which became an exhibition and a book, “Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans” (1944), are here.
Laura McPhee’ ‘Midsummer (Lupine and Fireweed)’ (2008)
Photo:
Laura McPhee/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Ms. McPhee’s color diptych of a lodge pole pine forest in Idaho after a wildfire invites comparisons to Adams. In the early spring of 2008, she photographed the scorched trunks, mottled like the skin of a leopard. By midsummer, though, shoots of lupine and fireweed were peeking through the ground. Ms. Haas has hung nearby an apropos print by Adams from 1935, “Grass and Burned Stump, Sierra Nevada, California,” on the theme of regeneration.
Optimism is harder to find in the last galleries, where Adams’s photographs of California ghost towns in the ’30s are matched with Mr. Epstein’s sarcastic view from 2007 of a California golf course next to a dusty field crowded with wind turbines.
Mitch Epstein’s ‘Altamont Pass Wind Farm, California’ (2007)
Photo:
Mitch Epstein/Museum of Fine Art, Boston
Adams did not pretend to be the first photographer in places now identified with him. He measured himself against what Watkins had done in Yosemite, openly imitated O’Sullivan’s views of Canyon de Chelly in N.M., and was honored to continue their tradition.
For some landscape photographers, Adams continues to be a touchstone. For many others, he and his tradition are outmoded and clueless about technology that has put a camera in everyone’s hands. Whatever the case, this exhibition argues, he should not be ignored. See it and decide for yourself.
—Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.
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