Ansel Adams
“I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.”
My thoughts:
It is tempting, but too easy, to think of Ansel Adams as simply the Norman Rockwell of landscape photography, immensely popular but insignificant. Every year there is yet another books produced capturing some aspect of his career, another calendar featuring his breathtaking black-and-white views of Yosemite Valley in California.
Adams photographs have been around for so long and are so familiar it’s hard to see them with fresh eyes.
I his 1941 work "Moonrise Over Hernandez, N.M.," showing the expansive heavens stretching above the cemetery of a tiny Western town. This image was so wildly popular that Adams made hundreds of prints of it. Copies of "Moonrise" came up for auction with such regularity that for a time in the 1970's some dealers and collectors even used it as an informal benchmark to indicate the strength of the photography market. …show more content…
The exspansive sky towers above a tiny town with streaking clouds right above fading into darkness and the whole image is masterfully printed to wring every bit of emotion from it.
Other classic Adams photos harness modernist abstraction to sentimental scenes in much the same way. In a 1944 shot “Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California” for example, the tiny figure of a horse is caught in a slant of sunlight at the bottom of the composition. Behind it rises to hills and snowy mountains contrast with the sky have a hint of fluffy
“I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.”
My thoughts:
It is tempting, but too easy, to think of Ansel Adams as simply the Norman Rockwell of landscape photography, immensely popular but insignificant. Every year there is yet another books produced capturing some aspect of his career, another calendar featuring his breathtaking black-and-white views of Yosemite Valley in California.
Adams photographs have been around for so long and are so familiar it’s hard to see them with fresh eyes.
I his 1941 work "Moonrise Over Hernandez, N.M.," showing the expansive heavens stretching above the cemetery of a tiny Western town. This image was so wildly popular that Adams made hundreds of prints of it. Copies of "Moonrise" came up for auction with such regularity that for a time in the 1970's some dealers and collectors even used it as an informal benchmark to indicate the strength of the photography market. …show more content…
The exspansive sky towers above a tiny town with streaking clouds right above fading into darkness and the whole image is masterfully printed to wring every bit of emotion from it.
Other classic Adams photos harness modernist abstraction to sentimental scenes in much the same way. In a 1944 shot “Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California” for example, the tiny figure of a horse is caught in a slant of sunlight at the bottom of the composition. Behind it rises to hills and snowy mountains contrast with the sky have a hint of fluffy