Ansel Adams - notes on selected readings

Notes from background reading

Personal Credo
by AA American Annual of Photography, 1944 

'My approach to photography is based on my belief in the vigor and values of the world of Nature - in the aspects of grandeur and minutiae all around us. I believe in growing things, and in the things that have grown and died magnificently. I believe in people and the simple aspects of human life, and in the relation of man to nature. I believe man must be free, both in spirit and in society, and he must build strength into himself, affirming the 'enormous beauty of the world' and acquiring the confidence to see and express his vision. And I believe in photography as one means of expressing this affirmation, and of achieving an ultimate happiness and faith.'



The Print
by Ansel Adams, extracts on visualisation and print values 

Visualisation (Chapter 1)

• The print is a combination of mechanical and creative
• Mechanical because the print depends on the quality of its raw material, the negative, where the photographer has one chance to create it (so, he/she must exert strict control to achieve a good result)
• Creative because producing the print enables the photographer to use subtle variations in interpreting the image according to his personal vision
• If the negative is akin to a musician's score, the print is his/ her performance (can be delivered numerous times, each a unique version)
• (Pre-) visualisation is the most important factor in making the photograph, from selecting the subject to producing the final print. Start with the end in mind.
• Practice in visualisation is essential. (a) Observe the world around us. Be aware of shape and form. Interpret tonal values. Identify emotional and human significance. (b) Look at others' images and re-visualise them in your own way (even though you are unaware of constraints arising from the location, the quality of light or the photographer's emotional reaction to the subject)
• The print is therefore an opportunity to interpret the negative according to the original visualisation as well as our current thinking about the final image

Difference between a 'fine' and a 'very good' print

• A fine print satisfies both photographer and viewer. It will probably have a full range of tonal values (bit only if it needs it, not as a slavish rule). It will clearly delineate form and texture. It will have a satisfactory print 'colour'
• On tones, a note of pure white or black can serve as a key for all other values but this is not a rule applying to all prints. Also, ensure that the high values are distinct and open so that they convey a sense of substance and texture without being drab or flat
• Nevertheless, meeting all these criteria doesn't necessarily result in a fine print.
• The ultimate test is whether the print is expressive: does it reveal what you saw and felt? And in establishing if this is so, pay particular attention to your first impression.

Ansel Adams - Photography from the Mountains to the Sea
by Phillip Prodger, Curator's notes to exhibition at National Maritime Museum (November 2012 to April 2013).  Attended in December 2012.

• Water was one of AA's favourite subjects

Beginnings - arrival of Modernism

• In the early 20th Century the older generation of photographers clung to Pictorialism, the ascendant movement of the time. Art in photography must imitate painting - soft focus, textured paper, coloured emulsions, evoking stories from mythology or literature. 
• After the horrors of WW1, the younger generation saw this approach as hopelessly sentimental and nostalgic.
• Gradually harder edged forms took hold. Modernists - like AA - embraced the camera's mechanical qualities, 'let the camera speak'

Favoured water subjects

• Sea and surf
• Coasts
• Rivers
• Waterfalls
• Rapids
• Snow and Ice
• Geysers
• Clouds
• Water reflections

Favourite locations in California

• Sonoma County - rugged Pacific coastline and magnificent redwoods
• San Francisco - wild coastlines, ocean, headlands beyond the city
• Yosemite National Park - numerous trails, waterfalls, mountains. Site of much of his most famous work
• Kings Canyon National Park - lakes, pools, sequoia trees, cliffs. AA influenced the decision to establish this as a national park
• Death Valley National Park - extremes: searing heat, sudden rainstorms, dry basins, wild flowers, sand dunes, mountains, vast plains
• Monterey and Carmel - pristine coastline, spectacular surf
• Lake Tahoe - turquoise lakes, mountains

Style - Equivalents

• AA believed that images should communicate the photographers mood at the time the image was made, an idea he took from Stieglitz, based on the Equivalents, as series of dramatic, horizon-less clouds, expressive in nature and meditative in intent

Style - Zone System

• AA pioneered this method of controlling exposure
• The photographer exposes (in film) for the detail of the darkest shadows and then varies the time of chemical development in the darkroom so that every shade of grey is represented from light to dark
• Each negative is made and processed painstakingly by hand
• One of the goals of the Zone System was to create prints with bright, shimmering greys in mid tones 

Style - Focus and f/64 school

• AA found Group f/64 in 1932, derived from the smallest aperture of lens available at that time for large format cameras. Despite its 3 year life, it had a lasting impact on photographic practice
• Images at this aperture are exceedingly sharp
• This was considered radical at the time
• f/64 photographers did not want to represent the world as the eye sees it, rather make pictures according to the capabilities of the camera and lens

Zone System
by David Prakel, from Working in Black and White

• Developed AA and Fred Archer in 1941 from articles in US Camera Magazine by John L Davenport with the aim of bridging the gap between sensitometry (the study and measurement of light sensitive materials) and creative, expressive photography
• AA's system divided tones in 10 grades representing the dynamic range of 10 stops of films of his day, from Zone 0 (pure black) to IX (pure white)
• Since its original formulation the system has expanded to 11 zones. Of these, Zone V is mid-grey (18% reflectance) and Zones from II to VIII reveal texture.  
• 2 key concepts in the Zone System are 'place' and 'fall', whereby the standard light meter reading of a single tone (e.g. a white mug) will always return Zone V - mid grey (place) and all other tones in the scene will vary from that reference point (fall). If the photographer wants to show the measured tone at a different tonal value (say, Zone VII), then the system signals (in this case) that he/ she must dial up exposure by 2 stops.

Development of US landscape photography
by Gerry Badger, The Genius of Photography, Chapter 4 'On the Road'

Taking the viewer there

• Basically there are 3 photographic subjects - people, objects, places
• Lee Friedlander said he was interested in 'people and people things' but tended to express his interests in the depiction of places
• The chief reason why people makes images of places is because they want to take people there, this applies as much to Friedlander as to the postcard photographer and the snap shooter
• From the outset the camera has always been used to show people what the next town or the world at large looks like.
• In Britain and France - where photography began - height of empire pushed photographers to travel to colonies photographing people, things and places both to show the sublime and the beautiful to the public as well as document for commercial or scientific purposes
• The beginnings of photography coincided with the start of mass tourism (e.g. Thomas Cook started his travel agency in 1865 with a Nile cruise). Both reinforced the development of the other.
• At this time also, the American Civil War was the first conflict to be extensively documented. In fact, George Barnard's recording of the Unionist campaign in Georgia and the Carolinas is now seen not so much as war but as landscape photography, where land was shaped by battles and engineering to defend territory or transport troops and supplies

Rebel Works in front of Atlanta, George Barnard (1866)

• When the war ended some photographers, such as Timothy O'Sullivan, moved on to document the opening up of the West over the next 25 years, recording the march of the railways towards the Pacific, military expeditions and how land might be exploited for profit. At the same time, he invested a credible meditation on nature and man's place in it. 
• The dichotomy of art and science was present in O'Sullivan's work as it was in that of Carleton Watkins.

Carleton Watkins (1829 - 1916)

• Of his era (mid 19th century), his images are the best poised between documentation and art
• His aim was to present his subject as true and clearly as possible. He belonged to a school of US photographers described by Joel Snyder: 'Accuracy is identified with fine detail, objectivity with distance, art with craftmanship, documentation with transcription and interest with the obligations of a good citizen and not with any intrinsic qualities of the picture'
• He won medals at international photographic salons for his images of Yosemite Valley made in 1861, photographs that were instrumental in getting Yosemite established as a national park in 1864. 
• Yet his images of railway or mining companies were much more straightforward, reflecting that mostly landscape photography in the 19th century was a practical affair.

Three Brothers, Yosemite Valley, Carleton Watkins (1865/6)

View of mines at Merysville Montana, Carleton Watkins (1883)

Cape Horn near Celilo, Carleton Watkins (1867)

Landscape and the transcendental tradition

• With advent of modernism photography of place had become a genre of self-expression in the hands of would-be art photographers
• Stieglitz's Equivalents (images of dramatic clouds) were intended to provoke free association as a form of meditation
• AA, an admirer of Stieglitz, made lucid though somewhat operatic photographs of the American West, maintaining the documentary clarity of Watkins.
• Unlike Watkins, AA removed any reference to the contemporary, producing meditations on the timeless Eden that was already lost when Watkins photographed in in the 1860s
• Yet AA's 'shamelessly romantic' images answered a need and were very popular. 
• He believed that his twin causes of conservation and straight photography were best served by idealistic rendition of the landscape, the land as we want it to be rather than how it is.
• Although AA photographed what was there, he obtained his heightened effect by camera craft and a deep knowledge of photochemistry to create highly controlled negatives and prints.
• 'Clearing Winter Storm' was taken from a viewpoint at which tourists can look down the Yosemite Valley. Millions of photographs of this scene must have been taken over the years, and a far few by AA. On this one occasion, AA got the image breathtakingly 'right'. The image contains no trace of the tourist industry that surrounds it. This is an image of how Yosemite may have looked thousands of years ago. 

Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite, Ansel Adams (1944)

• Despite the absence of direct social or critical content in his photographs, AA was more politically active than most photographers with his campaigning for the environment.
• The idea of 'equivalence' is important in American photography, one can find some kind of epiphany in the depiction of objects and places.  Walker Evans looked for this transcendence in his work, in his case through places formed by man rather than mountains, lakes and skies.
• Depsite AA's popularity, Walker Evans proved more influential on later generations of photographers, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.
• In the modernist movement, Stieglitz may have started it, AA was the most popular, but Evans was the one engaging with photography's fundamental subject - the here and now, and after WW2 that meant the man-made rather than the natural world

Neutrality and the man-altered landscape

• By the mid 1970s the iconography of the commonplace (Friedlander, Shore, Eggleston) was standard currency amongst leading US photographers
• Other factors were at work too. 'Artists' who were not 'photographers' began to 'utilize' photography' as a medium to communicate their ideas. 
• In Germany in the mid 1960s Bernd Becher and his wife Hilla began to photograph the industrial legacy of Western Europe. In 1975 an exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of Man Altered Landscape introduced a new generation of photographers of the American environment (Shore, Robert Adams, Baltz, Nixon, Misrach)
• The New Topographics exhibition showed landscape photographers with an interest in the beauty at the junction of city and country, man and nature (Robert Adams photographed tacky urban developments in Colorado, Baltz the anonymity of industrial buildings inCalifornia). It also revealed a group of photographers whose style was low key and neutral, in contrast to the expressiveness of Ansel Adams (Baltz referred to images without authors or art)

Colorado Springs, Robert Adams, 1968

Merced River, Yosemite National Park, Stephen Shore (1979)

Bomb Crater and Destroyed Convoy, Richard Misrach  (1986)

Tallahatchie County, William Eggleston (1972)

• The New Topographics was highly influential in the photography of place in the 1980s and 1990s. 
• The most pressing issue in current photography of place is its history, how it had been affected by time, climate, mankind. Since the 1970s the best landscape photography has gone beyond asking the viewer to inhabit the space depcited. It asks him or her to think more deeply about how a place came into being, how environmental and social pressures may change it and the way people use it. We always photographing culture.

Significance and meaning of Ansel Adams' work
John Szarkowski entry in www.britannica.com

Key points

• Most important landscape photographer of the 20th century
• (perhaps) Most widely known and loved photographer in US history
• Popularity of his work has only increased since his death
• A vigorous and outspoken leader of the conservation movement

Style

• AA's most important work was what was or appeared to be the country’s remaining fragments of untouched wilderness, especially in national parks and other protected areas of the American West
• Most powerful work came from  effort to discover an adequate visual expression for his near-mystical youthful experience of the Sierra
• His images are characterised by pristine, technical perfection
• His work differs from his 19th century predecessors who photographed the West - most notably Carleton Watkins - by his interest in the transient and the ephemeral. If Watkins captured the geology, AA photographed the weather
• Range of mood in AS’s work reflects the contrast between 'the benevolent generosity of the valley, with its cool, clear water and lush vegetation, and the desiccated, inhospitable stringency of the eastern slope of the Sierra'.

Contemporary views of AA's work as a 'serious' photographer

• In 1930s many critics thought AA should be making pictures that related more directly to the social and political issues of the day rather than impeccable photographs of remote mountain peaks in the High Sierra, so pure they were almost sterile
• At that time, Dorothea Lange and others were photographing the dust bowl and plight of migrants, Margaret Bourke-White was capturing Soviet Russia and great engineering projects and Walker Evans was recording the inscrutable - or at least ambiguous - face of America's built culture
• Not until a generation later did it become widely seen that conservation for the environment was a social priority

Influence on the development of photography as 'fine art'

• AA used his prominence to increase public perception of photography as fine art
• Examples of this include: (a) 1940, helping to set up the first department of photography at MoMA, NYC; (b) establishing the California's School of Fine Arts first academic department to teach photography as a profession

Influence on the conservation movement

• AA was an ardent conservationalist from adolescence and director of the Sierra Club, from 1934 to 1971
• Many of his books in the later part of his career raised awareness of the need to preserve the natural landscape and the life which it supported. Most notable was 'This is the American Earth' (1960), one of the seminal texts in the reawakening of the conservation movement of the 1960s and 1970s
• In 1980 the award of his Presidential Medal of Freedom cited: 'It is through [Adams'] foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans'

Ansel Adams, appraisal as a photographer

By William Turnage (Managing Trustee, Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust)

http://www.anseladams.com/ansel-adams-information/ansel-adams-biography/

Straight photography

• In 1930 Adams met photographer Paul Strand, whose images had a powerful impact on Adams and helped to move him away from the “pictorial” style he had favoured in the 1920s.
• Adams began to pursue “straight photography,” in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the final print gave no appearance of being manipulated in the camera or the darkroom.
• Adams was soon to become straight photography’s mast articulate and insistent champion.
• [Ed. Note: Manipulated in this instance meaning altering the clarity or content of the photographed subject matter. Techniques such as "burning" and "dodging", as well as the Zone System, a scientific system developed by Adams, is used specifically to 'manipulate' the tonality and give the artist the ability to create as opposed to record.] 

Adams as a technician

• Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he revelled in the theory and practice of the medium
• Weston and Strand frequently consulted him for technical advice. He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns.
• Adams developed the famous and highly complex “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization.
• He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject.

Role in promoting photography as fine art

• Adams described himself as a photographer, lecturer and writer.
• It would perhaps be more accurate to say that he was simply - and compulsively - a communicator.
• He endlessly travelled the country in pursuit of both the natural beauty he revered and photographed and the audiences he required.
• Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting photography as a fine art and played a key role in the establishment of the first museum department of photography, at MoMa in New York.
• The work at the museum fostered the closest relationships of Adams’s life, with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, a historian and museum administrator and a writer-designer, respectively.
• Their partnership was arguably the most potent collaboration in twentieth-century photography.

Role in conservation

• In the 1950s and 1960s Nancy Newhall and Adams created a number of books and exhibitions of historic significance, particularly the Sierra Club’s 'This is the American Earth' (1960), which, with Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, played a seminal role in launching the first broad-based citizen environmental movement.
• Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians.

Symbols of the American wilderness

• His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America.
• When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph.

Mystical qualities 

• His black-and-white images were not “realistic” documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty.
• He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing.
• For Adams, the environmental issues of particular importance were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness.
• He focused on what he termed the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted the Park Service’s “resortism,” which had led to the over development of the national parks and their domination by private concessionaires.
• But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions and sea otters, and for clean air and water.
• An advocate of balanced, restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental mendacity and shortsightedness.
• Yet he invariably treated his opponents with respect and courtesy

Absence of human presence

• Adams was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of “humanity” in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that “the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees” (quoted by Adams, Oral History, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, p. 498).
• Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists.
• On the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been preserved for all time.
• There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues.

Last defining figure of romantic tradition?

• Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography.
• Adams always claimed he was not “influenced,” but, consciously or unconsciously, he was firmly in the tradition of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Carlton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge.
• And he was the direct philosophical heir of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir.
• He grew up in a time and place where his zeitgeist was formed by the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and “muscular” Americanism, by the pervading sense of manifest destiny, and the notion that European civilization was being reinvented — much for the better — in the new nation and, particularly, in the new West.

 Popularity of Adams

• As John Swarkowski states in the introduction to Adams’s Classic Images (1985), “The love that Americans poured out for the work and person of Ansel Adams during his old age, and that they have continued to express with undiminished enthusiasm since his death, is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even unparalleled in our country’s response to a visual artist” (p. 5).
• Why should this be so? What generated this remarkable response?
• Adams’s subject matter, the magnificent natural beauty of the West, was absolutely, unmistakably American, and his chosen instrument, the camera, was a quintessential artifact of the twentieth-century culture.
• He was blessed with an unusually generous, charismatic personality, and his great faith in people and human nature was amply rewarded.
• Adams channelled his energies in ways that served his fellow citizens, personified in his lifelong effort to preserve the American wilderness.
• Above all, Adams’s philosophy and optimism struck a chord in the national psyche. More than any other influential American of his epoch, Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment.
• It is difficult to imagine Ansel Adams occurring in a European country or culture and equally difficult to conjure an artist more completely American, either in art or personality

Straight Photography

Chapter in 'Photography The Whole Story', Juliet Hacking

Key events

• 1904 - Sadakichi Hartman (1867 - 1944) first uses the term 'straight photography' in an essay to distinguish it, the pin sharp and tone rich images, from soft-focus Pictorialism
• 1917 - Paul Strand argues for images to be sharply focused and clearly camera made (Photography and the New God)
• 1922 - Edward Weston meets Alfred Stieglitz. His photos of Armco Steel plant in Ohio mark his move away from Pictorialism
• 1923/5 - Imogen Cunningham makes a series of detailed close up images of magnolias, highlighting their abstract qualities

Magnolias, Imogen Cunningham (1925)

• 1927 - Weston works on a major series of still lifes of organic subjects (peppers, shells and eggs) accentuating their sculptural form

Pepper #30, Edward Weston (1930)

• 1932 - Group f/64 founded by AA, Weston, Cunningham and other Californian photographers
• 1935 - AA publishes his first photography guide: 'Making a Photograph', covering the mechanics and aesthetics of the medium
• 1937 - Weston is the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship, beginning a 2 year project to document the American West
• 1939/40 - AA and Fred Archer codify the Zone System for exposure and development control
• 1940 - AA co-founds a department of photography at MoMA, NYC, the first of its kind in the US
• 1945 - AA sets up the fine art photography department at California School of Fine Arts. Cunningham and Lange join him

Commentary

• Early decades of 20th century - a small group of US photographers rebelled against Pictorialism
• Modernists ( Straight Photography) argued for (a) graphic, black and white photographs full of texture and detail (cf. emulating the look of charcoal drawings or heavily inked prints) and (b) focus on everyday objects
• Key spokesman of this movement was Alfred Stieglitz (1864 - 1946). He had protégés in the East (Sheeler, Steichen, Strand) and West (AA, Weston, Cunningham)
• They took up large format cameras and revelled in the clarity and gradations of tone which they achieved
• 1932 - the Western branch formed Group f/64 with a shared commitment to larger format cameras and un-manipulated, sharp 'straight' prints and the use of purely photographic methods

Appraisal of AA's work
by Ian Jeffrey, How to Read a Photograph

Key points

• Took pictures for c. 5o years, mostly landscapes in California
• Taken to Yosemite as a child and remained attached to the area for life as well as the Sierra Nevada and the 'idea of Earth'
• AA's art was one of great themes, geographical and geological

Career summary

• In 1920s AA was a Pictorialist
• c.1930 he started to favour a sharp focus, objective style, influenced by Edward Weston, Paul Strand and emerging German photographers in the 1920s as well as Stieglitz's concept of the 'equivalent' - communicating through the image the emotion which the photographer felt towards his subject
• Established himself in 1930s, although over-worked and his health suffered
• 1933 - met Stielglitz and fell sufficiently under his spell to get caught up in some of his feuds (e,g, with MoMA, NYC which he considered too complacent)
• 1934 - he was elected to the Board of the Sierra Club, investing effort in its various campaigns
• 1937 - a fire at his studio damaged many of his early negatives: AA saw this as an opportunity to begin again
• 1940 - AA helped to found the department of photography at MoMA

Style - sharp focus

• Co-founded Group f/64 in 1932
• Group subscribed to sharp focus objective photography
• Aim was to be true to the nature of things, to their essence rather than how they might seem in diverse conditions
• However Group f/64 only lasted until 1934: AA was concerned that it might become an ideology and a constraint

Style - segmented composition

• From late 1920s his landscapes shows distinctly compartmentalised composition: blocks of rock, forested slopes, sheets of ice, towering clouds
• Modernist believed that

What is style?
Essays by Gerry Badger, The Pleasures of Good Photographs

Without Author or Art: the Quiet Photograph

What is style?

• Every photographer of ambition and serious intent must resolve the 'vexing' issue of style
• Why? His or her work must both get noticed and have consistency (without which it is formless - form of some sort must be the artist's goal)
• Cultivating style comes partly from within and partly from external influences
• However, the  key problem with style is that it constrains, i.e. refines the look of an image so that it relates to the main body of the photographer's work.
• Consequently, style might be defined as the formal establishment of constraints by the artist. These may be (a) technical, (b) formalist (compositional), (c) conceptual and/or (d) contextual.
• For any 20th century artists one can name a few key images that say everything about his or her style, the rest either emanate or revolve around the keys. (Only the greatest - like Picasso - escape these constraints)
• The search for 'style' often leads to narrowness of subject and technique

Robert Adams' Listening to the River

Comment on Ansel Adams

• [Robert Adams does not look] to the national parks, to the operatic scenic extravaganzas that were the trademark of his namesake, AA