Ansel Adams in Our Time: Notes from the Exhibition

Exhibition: Ansel Adams in Our Time

Dates: April 8–July 23, 2023

Venue: de Young Museum, San Francisco

Overview: Ansel Adams is renowned for his crystalline black-and-white photographs of Yosemite National Park—iconic images that have become impossible to overlook.

Moonlight over Half Dome, the surging waters of Nevada Fall, the calm surface of the Merced River reflecting evergreens and granite peaks: these images seem inseparable from the history of the national park.

Yet over his decades-long career in photography and environmental advocacy, the San Francisco–born photographer captured far more than California wilderness. He also documented Los Angeles’s tangled freeways, Japanese Americans incarcerated at Manzanar during World War II, and the proliferation of oil derricks and pumpjacks that followed the discovery of oil in Long Beach.

Introduction

For many viewers, Ansel Adams’s photographs of the American West have become visual emblems of the places they depict. Combining technical mastery with a modernist sensibility, he focused on his profound connection to the natural world. That connection continues to resonate in new ways today, as the landscapes around us undergo relentless change.

This is an exhibition about legacy. More than one hundred works by Adams enter into a new, two-way dialogue: with nineteenth-century photographers who preceded him and with contemporary photographers revisiting some of the same places and environmental concerns. This context invites viewers to reconsider Adams’s influence on our conception of the Western landscape—and the urgency of preserving it.

Adams (1902–1984) was born in San Francisco and first picked up a camera in Yosemite at the age of fourteen. He returned to the park almost every year, and perhaps no other place exerted a deeper influence on him. In Yosemite, he both honed his craft and recognized photography’s power to portray the natural world as a source of spiritual renewal.

Monolith—The Face of Half Dome, Adams, 1927. This majestic view of Half Dome is among Adams’s most important and groundbreaking early photographs. Made during a hike in the spring of 1927, it marked his first deliberate act of “visualization”: fully envisioning the finished image before releasing the shutter. This enabled him to capture the scene’s emotional force. Although he did not make this enlargement until several years later, the negative dates to 1927, when a deep-red filter and long exposure—made possible by the windless conditions—recorded the dramatic sky and the stark contrast between brilliant snow and granite and the dark mountain ridge.

Marketing the Landscape

In 1919, at seventeen, Adams joined the Sierra Club. Initially devoted to conservation, the organization failed to acknowledge Indigenous peoples and their homelands. His involvement nevertheless laid the foundation for his emergence as a twentieth-century environmentalist. Adams joined the club’s annual High Trips and served as their photographer and assistant manager from 1930 to 1936. He assembled albums of the excursions and invited members to order proof prints or, at greater cost, “regular or soft-focus” enlargements. His ingenuity eventually led to his 1927 portfolio Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, one of his earliest experiments in custom-printing, sequencing, and distributing fine photographs.

Adams was not the first to market the landscapes of the American West. During the nineteenth century, images of the region were mass-produced and widely circulated to serve a booming tourist market. Today, contemporary artists use photography to emphasize the landscape’s dynamic nature and document humanity’s impact on the environment. Their work sometimes takes the form of extended series or grids, as though referring back to the early mass circulation of Western landscape imagery.

Becoming a Modernist

San Francisco was where Adams became a modernist photographer. He grew up in Sea Cliff, in a house overlooking the Presidio and the Marin Headlands. These views profoundly shaped his photography; he later described himself as continually returning to the natural elements that had surrounded him in childhood.

Adams’s first exhibition, featuring photographs made on Sierra Club outings, was held at the club’s Montgomery Street headquarters in 1928. Convinced that he could earn a living through photography, he bought a large-format camera and became an advocate of “straight photography,” abandoning the soft-focus aesthetic of his early work. He experimented with abstraction and extreme close-ups, capturing texture and sharply rendered detail. He photographed cloud-filled skies and portrayed the landscape as an apparently boundless, unpeopled space.

During the Great Depression, Adams began photographing a wider range of subjects, including the hardships of urban life in San Francisco and the region’s changing landscape. Among the latter was the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge between 1933 and 1937, which radically transformed the view of San Francisco Bay that had fascinated him in his youth.

Marin Headlands from Lincoln Park, Adams, 1952. Adams’s childhood home stood in what is now Sea Cliff, with sweeping views of the Marin Headlands and the Golden Gate Bridge. He described his bedroom as occupying the northwest corner of the second floor, a room about twelve feet square. From its north window he could see the Golden Gate; to the west were the cypresses and rolling dunes around present-day Lincoln Park, with the ocean beyond. Past Point Bonita and the pale shimmer of the Potato Patch, he could watch all manner of ships entering and leaving the Golden Gate.

In the American Southwest

Adams first visited the American Southwest in 1927. There he collaborated with writer Mary Austin on an illustrated book about Taos Pueblo, intended to convey the threat tourism posed to the community’s artistic and religious traditions. After obtaining permission from the Taos Pueblo Council, Adams made the photographs, paid a fee, and presented the Pueblo with a copy of the finished publication. He also photographed Indigenous cultural ceremonies that had become popular tourist attractions. His images of Indigenous dancers have a complicated legacy: although he was a non-Indigenous witness, he composed them carefully to exclude the surrounding crowds.

In Diné photographer Will Wilson’s series Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, the artist responds to and confronts the history of white artists portraying Indigenous people. His particular focus is on those who traveled west in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to document Native peoples as a “vanishing race”—a disappearance caused by genocide and colonization sanctioned by the United States government.

Moonrise, Adams, 1952. Moonrise is one of Ansel Adams’s best-known works—and one of the most famous photographs ever made. Adams was driving toward Santa Fe at dusk with his young son Michael and his friend Cedric Wright when he saw the town of Hernandez beneath the rising moon. He recalled: “The moon was rising over clouds and snow peaks in the east, while the evening sunlight in the west streamed through the clouds, making the crosses in the church cemetery blaze a brilliant white.”Adams stopped the car and frantically began setting up his camera. Unable to find his light meter, he remembered the moon’s luminance—250 foot-candles—and used it to estimate the exposure. He released the shutter only seconds before the sun disappeared and the town fell into shadow.

Presenting the National Parks

Photography played a crucial role in the creation of the national parks. Compelling nineteenth-century landscape photographs by Carleton E. Watkins and others ultimately helped persuade government officials to protect Yosemite and Yellowstone from private development. Yet the establishment of the parks further dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands, disregarded their continuing stewardship, and restricted their access.

Although Adams maintained that he never consciously made creative photographs directly concerned with environmental issues, he understood the power of images to shape attitudes toward conservation. His photographs of Kings Canyon helped the Sierra Club campaign successfully for the area to become a national park. In the years that followed, Adams photographed national parks from Alaska to Texas and from Hawaii to Maine, creating images that conveyed their transformative power to a broad public.

Many contemporary artists working in national parks acknowledge the efforts of earlier photographers such as Adams. But the complicated legacy and uncertain future of these protected lands have led some photographers to take more personal and political approaches to the work they make there.

Meadow and Reflections, Adams, 1943. Lyell Fork was one of Adams’s favorite places during his early years as a photographer in Yosemite, and one he enjoyed introducing to others. In 1938, he led Georgia O’Keeffe and photography collector David McAlpin on a hike deep into the backcountry there. Several distant peaks are reflected in the still water. The most prominent was named Mount Ansel Adams after his death in 1984.

Early Morning, Adams, 1950. Adams sometimes photographed natural landscapes interwoven with the surrounding built environment. Through his choice of viewpoint, however, he deliberately excluded such elements as parking lots, scenic overlooks, and park visitors. Describing where he made this photograph near the Merced River, Adams noted: “This serene subject was only about one hundred feet from the highway.”

Old Faithful Geyser, Adams, 1942. Adams began writing introductory books on photography in the mid-1930s, but he is best known for a series of technical volumes that included Camera and Lens, The Negative, The Print, and Natural Light Photography. In a later book, he used this image of a Yellowstone geyser as an example of a particularly challenging subject—one that defeated light-meter readings and tested the photographer’s ability to “visualize” in advance because it was inherently fleeting and unpredictable. He wrote: “It is hard to imagine anything more impressive than a white column of water erupting in sunlight against a deep-blue sky.”

Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Old Faithful Geyser, Abelardo Morell, 2011

Early in his career, Abelardo Morell began experimenting with the camera obscura—Latin for “dark room.” Through a small aperture or lens, the technique projects an inverted image of the outside world onto the opposite wall of an interior. More recently, Morell refined the process by using a tent fitted with a periscope and angled mirror, with a digital camera pointed at the ground to capture a sweeping landscape projected across its surface. By combining distant views with the grass, pebbles, pine needles, sand, or even pavement underfoot, Morell turns the terrain into his “canvas,” transforming familiar scenes into otherworldly, impressionistic images.

Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View, Abelardo Morell, 2012

Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of the Rio Grande and Mexico from near Boquillas Canyon, Abelardo Morell, 2011. Morell made this photograph along the Rio Grande, which runs for more than one hundred miles through Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas and forms the border between the United States and Mexico. The scene’s serenity conceals the fact that this is a contested—and at times volatile—space. Morell’s tent camera optically reverses the river’s northern and southern banks, while the mysteriously floating compass intensifies the sense of displacement and disorientation.

The Other Side of the Mountain

Adams’s reputation rests largely on his portrayals of seemingly untouched natural beauty. Less familiar are the works he made in California’s Owens Valley and in Death Valley, southeast of Yosemite.

On the arid side of the Sierra Nevada, Adams and his work took a dramatic turn. Photographer Edward Weston introduced him to Death Valley, where he photographed dunes, salt flats, and sandstone canyons. Owens Valley had once been farmland, but after much of its water was diverted in 1913 to supply the expanding city of Los Angeles, local residents faced severe hardship. In 1943, Adams made his first trip to nearby Manzanar, where he photographed Japanese Americans forcibly removed to an incarceration camp after the United States entered World War II. The resulting series explores the tension between the region’s vast open spaces and the physical confinement imposed on the incarcerated people.

Contemporary photographers continue to find compelling subjects in these remote regions. Their work explores both the land’s stark beauty and its sometimes troubling uses today—including as the site of a maximum-security prison and of secret military projects conducted beneath its immense skies.

Winter Sunrise, Adams, 1944. The small town of Lone Pine lies on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, backed by steep mountains. As with his photograph Clearing Winter Storm, Adams tried to capture this scene in other seasons but was never satisfied. On this occasion, stirred by the cold air and shimmering atmosphere, he set up his camera in total darkness and waited for sunrise. At last, a slender shaft of light illuminated the valley, revealing the silhouette of a grazing pony amid sharply alternating bands of light and shadow. Years later, he reflected: “Sometimes I think I arrived at those places just when God was ready to have someone release the shutter!”

The Tetons and the Snake River, Adams, 1942

Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Adams, 1947. Adams made this photograph of Mount McKinley in Denali National Park at 1:30 a.m., only two hours after the midsummer sunset. He recalled: “As the sun rose, the clouds and mist cleared, and the mountain turned an unbelievable pink. Before Mount McKinley, Wonder Lake took on a pearly glow, cradled by dark shorelines. I made the image I had visualized. The scale of the great mountain was incredible—the camera and I were thirty miles from its base.”

Sand Fence, Adams, 1948. Once home to silver, zinc, and lead mines, Keeler, California, stands on the eastern shore of what was once Owens Lake. This immense body of water began to dry up in the early twentieth century after most of the Owens River was diverted to Los Angeles. The exposed lakebed became a major source of dust pollution, and sand fences like these were an attempt to contain its alkaline soil. Keeler’s desolate existence seems perfectly expressed by the winding curves of these wooden barriers. Their seemingly impossible task—holding the earth in place in this afflicted region—embodies the opposing forces of humanity and nature in a landscape under siege.

Dunes, Sunrise, Adams, 1948. Adams initially found Death Valley’s bright, desolate expanse an exceptionally difficult subject. Years later, in his memoir Trip to Furnace Creek, he described making this photograph in detail: “After spending the night on the photographic platform atop my car, I woke before dawn, made some coffee, and filled up on beans left over from dinner. Then I shouldered my camera and tripod and trudged heavily across the shifting dunes, searching for the right light on just the right dune…. At that moment, almost as if by magic, I saw an image come into being: the rising sun traced a perfect line across a dune, now illuminated, now submerged in shadow.”

Subsatellite Ferret-D (Electronic Intelligence Satellite; USA 3) above the Eastern Sierra Nevada, Trevor Paglen, 2012Trevor Paglen’s nighttime view of the Sierra Nevada recalls Adams’s photographs of Mount Williamson and Lone Pine, made from similar vantage points nearly seventy years earlier. Paglen, however, does not emphasize the beauty of the natural landscape. Instead, using a high-tech telephoto lens and a long exposure, he reveals the path of a secret government satellite, faintly visible in the upper left corner.Paglen’s photographs do more than record what the unaided eye might miss. They reveal the ubiquity of surveillance across the vast, supposedly empty reaches of the American West. They also suggest that, in the post-9/11 era known as the “war on terror,” government-sponsored digital-imaging technology will exert an ever-growing influence on our lives.

Grays the Mountain Sends (series), Bryan Schutmaat, 2012. This series portrays the landscapes, buildings, and residents of former mining towns. Bryan Schutmaat seeks out remote mountain communities, now largely abandoned after the loss of their mineral wealth. Just as Adams first glimpsed Hernandez, New Mexico, in his rearview mirror, Schutmaat’s vision unfolds as part of an ongoing road trip. Like Adams, he is drawn to the deliberate working method imposed by a large-format camera, patiently waiting for shifting light to bring a scene to life. For Schutmaat, each town’s abandoned buildings and solitary residents are the last “vestiges of hope,” evidence of the American dream’s tragic collapse. The fragile, hard-won beauty of these modern ghost towns also offers a stark reminder of the region’s uncertain future and its long history of boom and bust.

Grays the Mountain Sends (series), Bryan Schutmaat, 2012

A Changing Landscape

Adams was keenly aware of the environmental problems confronting California and the nation in his lifetime. Although he continued to make symphonic images of pristine wilderness, his vision became more nuanced as his career progressed. These photographs decisively challenge the popular conception of his work. He photographed urban sprawl, freeways, graffiti, oil drilling, ghost towns, rural cemeteries, mining communities and their residents, as well as less romantic aspects of nature, such as the aftermath of forest fires.

Adams’s photographs are admired for their imagery and craft, but they also carry a message of advocacy. Artists photographing the American West today confront an ever-changing landscape. Human activities—including urbanization, logging, mining, grazing, and irrigated agriculture—continue to reshape the terrain. Contemporary artists bear witness to these changes and their consequences, challenging the notion that our natural resources are limitless. Placing their work alongside Adams’s photographs helps us understand his singular contribution to how we see the landscape and how urgently we feel the need to protect it.

Burned Tree, Adams, 1939

Midsummer (Fountain Grass and Willowherb), Laura McPhee, 2008. Laura McPhee uses a large-format camera to document the effects of human activity on the land, particularly in Idaho, a place she loves and visits often. These photographs come from her Guardians of Solitude series and were made after an immense forest fire. Caused by human error, the blaze destroyed thousands of acres of woodland before it was finally extinguished. When McPhee returned three years later, she found the area bursting back into life. In the regeneration of the burned landscape, she discovered a powerful metaphor for human resilience and recovery in the face of profound personal loss.

Early Spring (Peeling Bark in Rain), Laura McPhee, 2008

Railroad Tracks and Jet Trails, Adams, 1953

Altamont Pass Wind Farm, Mitch Epstein, 2007. Mitch Epstein’s American Power series investigates energy in its many forms: how we produce and consume it, and how it affects our daily lives. Often seen from a bird’s-eye perspective and printed on a monumental scale, these photographs of oil drilling, wind turbines, desert irrigation, and suburban sprawl question the meaning of power and point to our shared responsibility for the misuse of natural resources. In a world where photographs constantly inundate us, these densely detailed views are also intended to slow down our “reading” of images and remind us that every image can be interpreted in more than one way.

Signal Hill, Mitch Epstein, 2007. “American Power is an active response to the shattered American dream. My project focuses on the United States not only because I am American, but because America has exported its model of unlimited growth around the world through mass consumerism, corporatization, and urban sprawl. We now need to export a revised model of growth—a revised American dream. I included images of renewable energy, such as wind, biotechnology, and solar power, to show that a healthier, more economical, and more compassionate way of life is possible. American Power bears witness to the cost of growth; it asks viewers to consider the landscapes they create and the responsibility they bear for them.” —Mitch Epstein

Surf Sequence, Adams, 1940

Beach Restoration after El Niño Waves, Lucas Foglia, 2016. Hurricane Sandy was a turning point for Lucas Foglia, who witnessed its devastation of his family’s Long Island farm in 2012. Convinced of the connection between human behavior, climate change, and destructive storms of this kind, he set out to document the many ways people use science and technology to respond to climate change. Now based in California, Foglia photographed workers and machinery engaged in the arduous, ultimately futile task of reinforcing the Pacific shoreline against El Niño winds and waves. His sharply angled view from the highway deliberately echoes the abstract compositions of Adams’s 1940 Surf Sequence.

In this triptych from the Littoral Drift series, highly abstract images capture the salt, sediment, and motion within ocean waves. Meghann Riepenhoff creates her intricately orchestrated cyanotypes by immersing large sheets of photographic paper directly in the surf, including the waters of Puget Sound. She describes them as “cameraless cyanotypes made in collaboration with the landscape and the ocean, at the edge where the two meet.” Each unique print is spread across the beach and exposed to sunlight to form the image. Displayed together, the works seem to refer to Adams’s nearly abstract Surf Sequence.

Salt Flats near Wendover, Adams, 1941. Adams made this highly abstract photograph of an ancient salt bed during the first year of his national parks project. A delicate line of telephone poles and wires is barely visible in the distance, an incongruous presence in such an empty place. Adams may have included the poles partly because Wendover marked a junction on the first telephone line between New York and San Francisco. The achievement was celebrated at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which the young Adams attended almost daily: his father gave him a season pass and instructed him to visit each day in place of formal schooling.

Housing Development, Adams, 1966. During the 1950s and 1960s, Adams frequently documented urban subjects, as in this view toward San Bruno Mountain south of San Francisco. Here he recorded one of the many housing developments built during the period, winding across steep hillsides around the rapidly expanding city.

Untitled (FarmWorker), Victoria Sambunaris, 2010. Made from the Mexican side of the border fence dividing Mexico from the United States, this view records the vast industrial farmlands surrounding Jacumba, south of San Diego, California. Before the mid-1990s, this was an unmonitored border that could easily be crossed on foot. The fence now snakes between distant hills, intensively irrigated fields, and arid land.

Untitled (House), Victoria Sambunaris, 2007. Victoria Sambunaris often travels through the American West with her 5-by-7-inch large-format camera, driven by “an enduring curiosity about the American landscape and our place within it.” She returns to locations where she has worked before to see how human intervention has transformed them.Here, Sambunaris portrays Wendover, Utah, from her characteristic bird’s-eye perspective. The town was originally established as a stop on the Western Pacific Railroad, whose tracks remain visible in the distance. In the foreground, new development and expanding suburbs reach almost to the edge of the area’s celebrated salt flats. “What drives me across the American landscape is an attempt to uncover the layers of a place,” Sambunaris says. “I try to see the landscape as an anomaly, filled with information waiting to be discovered, rather than simply as scenery.”

Self-Portrait, Adams, 1958. This unusual self-portrait shows Adams holding a light meter beside his large-format camera and tripod. He photographed his shadow falling across a fissured rock face in Monument Valley while making a Colorama for display in New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Sponsored by Eastman Kodak, Coloramas were panoramic, backlit transparencies nearly eighteen feet high and sixty feet long. Their monumental scale and brilliant color stand in sharp contrast to this intimate image, made while Adams waited for the light to become just right.

Reflections

Although Adams’s work has long been familiar to me, seeing it in person was still overwhelming. The exhibition’s systematic presentation also gave me a deeper understanding of the photographer.
Structured as a dialogue, the exhibition places Adams’s photographs alongside contemporary photographers’ tributes and responses to the same locations and related issues. This adds visual interest and opens up more angles for reflection.
The older generation of photographers tended toward a more uniform, aestheticized approach. Contemporary photographers employ a wider range of forms, concentrate more on details, and favor the bird’s-eye view.
Photographers of both generations address shared human concerns: the degradation of the natural environment, social change, identity, and more. But the older generation’s expression feels natural, understated, and sincere, whereas contemporary photographers often seem to be making statements for their own sake—forcing the point or using the subject as a pretext—and can easily fall into the trap of political correctness.

Ansel Adams in Our Time: Notes from the Exhibition

Introduction

Marketing the Landscape

Becoming a Modernist

In the American Southwest

Presenting the National Parks

The Other Side of the Mountain

A Changing Landscape

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