Ansel Adams Exhibit at the HRC
If you live in the Hill Country/Central Texas area, you may be interested to know that the Harry Ransom Center at UT is currently doing a big Ansel Adams exhibit, showing some of the more famous and some of the less famous prints.
The exhibit is accompanied by a host of talks and presentations. One of these _mwife_ and I attended last night (together with RandomPupeteers), given by the last photographic assistant that Ansel Adams had, Mary Street Alinder, wife of photographer Jim Alinder and now a professor of history of photography at Stanford. She was the editor of Ansel Adams' autobiography, editor of his letters, and wrote the definitive biography a couple of years after his death (in order to gain the appropriate distance and complete the research).
The talk went a bit over, running almost two hours, but was quite captivating. She spent a bit of time assessing her own research and meeting of Adams, who she met as a good friend of her husband Jim, and how she helped him finish his autobiography and prepare the first exhibit of his work in Shanghai, China, as part of a cultural exchange program under San Francisco mayor (and now Senator) Diane Feinstein.
From there, she worked her way into Ansel Adams childhood and artistic development, as the son of a rich family falling onto increasingly hard times but very supportive of their son's artistic interests. While training to become a concert pianist, Ansel as a teenager acquired his early photographic skills with a small Kodak camera in Yosemite Park, which early on became a central element of his life. Ansel joined the Sierra Club and photographed many of the tours the Club organized; he also did postcard work early on for various camps in the Yosemite area. As such, he was able to lead people to where he wanted to take pictures. His participation in the photographic avantgard group f.64 was his contribution to trying to make photography acceptable as an art form. Adams was the first photographer since Paul Strand who managed to convinced art doyen Alfred Stieglitz to exhibit his work in his galleries in New York. Nevertheless, Adams was not able to live off anything but his commercial photography until the 1970s, when his status as an artist really took off. An interesting insight into Adams political convictions is the book Loyal Japanese, where he documented the outrageous treatment of Americans of Japanese descent during the Second World War in images and political essayism. Interestingly, Adams felt that documenting both these problems and the beauty of the natural were twin-contributions to making the world a better place; he would have argued, in Alinder's reconstruction, that it was at times like the current, with their political and natural disaster induced turmoil, that the documentation of beauty would bring necessary solace to the human soul.
Alinder was able to show that Adams, far from being a realist, was working hard to express visually the emotions that the subject matters he was fascinated with inspired. Early soft-focus expressionist pictures and massive laboring with filters and burning and dodging in the development room helped Ansel to show what could be seen in the natural wonders of Yosemite, not what was there to the naked eye. For the famous Moon rising over Hernandez, Mexico, she showed the original, which was at best a good vacation snapshot, and what Ansel had made out of this in the darkroom. Ansel, who interpreted the negative as a music score and the print-making as akin to a musical performance, did all of his printing himself and would spend about 3 days(!) printing one of the Moon pictures.
Alinder closed with an interesting piece of performance art: while they played the only studio recording of Ansel Adams as a pianist (a rendition of Beethoven's moonshine sonata, recorded in the 1940s), she flipped through a set of Adams most famous prints projected onto the presentation screen. A fascinating experience indeed.