Ansel Adams

 

Ansel Adams: From the Mountains to to Sea

A rare exhibition of Ansel Adams images is on show at the Australian National Maritime Museum until early December.

After patiently answering a long stream of questions about everything from how or why he’d taken a particular photograph to arcane technical queries about the Zone system, someone asked Ansel Adams if digital imaging technology could ever match the exquisite beauty of his 10×8-inch black and white negatives.

It was 1982 and a dozen of us were sitting in the spacious drawing room of Adams’ Carmel home. A baby grand piano gleamed in one corner (Adams’ arthritis had by then made playing nearly impossible) and on every wall were big, beautifully illuminated exhibition prints of his most famous images – including the astonishing Moonrise, Hernandez New Mexico.

We were all participants in one of his famous week-long photography workshops and after a day shooting nearby at the absurdly picturesque Point Lobos, we’d been invited to the Adams home for a tour of his huge darkroom and an evening question and answer session. For a bunch of large format landscape tragics it was the experience of a lifetime.

The moment someone asked the digital imaging question, the famous lopsided Adams grin lit up. He gleefully declared that from what he’d seen of the latest satellite imaging technology, the eventual triumph of digital was inevitable. He was just sorry that being in his early 80’s, he probably wouldn’t be around to use a commercial version of the technology himself.

It was the photographic equivalent of Bob Dylan asking Mike Bloomfield to back him on electric guitar during the 1965 Newport Folk festival (something that was famously greeted with jeers from the purist folkies in the crowd). Here, after all, was the inventor of the Zone system of exposure and development; the very apotheosis of traditional, large format landscape photography and he was metaphorically strapping on a Fender and turning it up to 11.

There weren’t any catcalls from the acolytes, but the odd eyebrow twitched upward. Although Kodak had been experimenting with digital imaging since the mid-1970s, consumer digital photography was then a decade away. And (affordable) digital cameras that could arguably match large format film were closer to 20 years in the future.

Ansel Adams had always been fascinated by new photographic technologies. His close involvement with the evolution of Polaroid instant photography began in 1949, when inventor Edwin Land hired him as a consultant only a year after the first model was released.

But Adams was not a technology-for-technology’s-sake guy. The final image was what mattered above all else. It was a photographer’s responsibility to master the tools and techniques so that their visualisations could be most fully and clearly expressed.

The Zone system itself was devised by Adams so that he could consistently produce images that were to the greatest extent possible, faithful to his original visualisations. And, whenever the technology of photography advanced – as for instance it had with Polaroid – Adams embraced and then mastered the new tools.

As the author of dozens of photographic books, Adams took a keen interest in the technical aspects of print reproduction. At any given moment in his long career, his publishers used the best available technology to print his books, but, beautiful as the publications are, they cannot match the purity of his exhibition prints. To really appreciate his mastery of the photographic printing process, one needs to see the originals.

Happily for Sydneysiders, in early July the Australian National Maritime Museum opened an exhibition of Adam’s work entitled Photography from the Mountains to the Sea. The show which runs until December 8, is made up of 70 images taken across the course of 50 years.

While the collection includes some of his most famous images, the curators have also included some lesser-known work. As the show announcement notes, ‘In addition to his well-known commissions, this exhibition allows visitors to see the pictures that Adams made for himself. These personal and sometimes experimental images express his thoughts about the natural world and often push the boundaries between realism and abstraction.’

This is an exceptional opportunity to see the work of the world’s most famous landscape photographer. It really is a must-see.

The Australian National Maritime Museum, in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, is open from 9.30am to 5pm daily. All enquiries visit  www.anmm.gov.au/anseladams.