I have been wanting to do this weekly post on my blog where I talk about a photographer that I studied while I was in college. I took photo history classes with the awesome professor Bill Jay (he had the coolest British accent) and other classes with my friend/teacher Gary Lewellen, who had us write papers about significant photographers. So I learned a lot about photo history and I want to try to remember and record some of what I learned here. So let's begin Photographer Fridays with Ansel Adams.
I went to see the Ansel Adams Exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum on Wednesday. I literally only had about 15-20 minutes that I could be there and some of that time was taken up parking, because the parking lot was packed and crazy. So here are my impressions of the Ansel Adams exhibition at the Phoenix Art. I have been wanting to see it for months and it's only going to be here for two more days! One of those days is First Fridays (tomorrow), so it will be free and open late if you want to go!
Impressions (in 10 minutes or less)-
The Camera- Ansel Adam's camera is on display at the exhibit of his work. It's kind of hidden in a corner at the very back of the space in a room devoted to telling about Ansel Adam's work teaching photography. When I first saw it, I just thought it was an example of the type of camera he used. To realize it was his camera was kind of an A-ha! Oh my goodness! moment. It was so HUGE. In my head all this time I had pictured him using an 4x5 view camera. Probably because I have used 4x5s and that was just the default image my brain came up with. An 8x10 view camera is just so. much. bigger. It's just hard to picture ever wanting to lug something like that around, considering that you also have to lug around all the negatives and negative holders and light meter and the tripod and the dark cloth to put over the camera and the bag to change out the negatives and who knows what else, probably lunch and dinner and coats and mittens and what all because whereever Ansel Adams went, he knew he was going to be staying there waiting for the light to be perfect.
The Difficulty - I was struck by the difficulty of the images he chose to make. Meaning he could have taken photos of the same scene when the light was not so contrasty, when there weren't clouds darkening half the road and the sun lighting the other half. I totally get that if he had done that then the image would not be as interesting or striking or beautiful or Ansel-Adams-ish. But that was one of my take-aways. It was like he waited til the light was at its most extreme and challenging, then he made the image.
Blur out your eyes! I remember when I took photo classes at ASU there was this idea that when studying an image, you should blur/squint your eyes so that you could only see the general shapes of the image. If after doing that, the image was still somehow pleasing to the eye just based on the shapes and tones of color, well that was a good thing, it meant the image was good. So I always find myself thinking of that when I see Ansel Adam's work. And yep, blur out your eyes on his photographs and they still work as beautiful images.
The Crowds - Is the Phoenix Art Museum always packed out on Wednesdays? I know that Wednesday is their free day/donation day, but I was just kind of amazed at how many people were there. Kids, groups, people on dates, all generations. It felt very big city, or like the mall the Saturday before Christmas. It actually made it hard to get in front of the images to actually see them, but it was so festive and lively that I did not care and I was just happy there were all these people getting to see Ansel Adam's art.
The Big Names! There is a little photograph at the back of the space (near Ansel's camera) in a display case that shows Ansel Adams with some other photographers. Dorothea Lange, Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, Minor White...who else...now I am having trouble remembering, but seeing that photo was so cool! Ansel was friends with all these people I read about back in college, with all these people that one of my favorite teachers Bill Jay would talk about. Friends before the Internet made it easier to connect! Somehow all these photographers found each other and hung out.
Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico! I saw a print of this years ago at the Oklahoma Art Museum. When I've seen this image in books or online, my head and eyes and heart do this thing that I just don't know how to explain. It's kind of that same feeling of realizing you have a crush on someone or standing on the edge of a cliff and looking down. My heart and head just kind of gasp when I see it. Every time. It doesn't matter that I have seen it before, I feel like I swoon over the beauty of it every time I see it! I've written about it here here before, but some things I always remember when I see this image: is how years later, people were able to figure out exactly when Ansel snapped the shutter on this image by looking at where the moon was in relation to the mountains*. And I remember reading that Ansel figured out the exposure by knowing the luminance of the moon (he shot it at f/32 at 1 second) ....... And that moments after he made the image, the sun had slipped too far below the horizon to expose another negative. That was it. That one moment in time.
A super-charming photo of Georgia O'Keefe taken by Ansel:
How cute is this! Even in this 35 mm image that Ansel is said to have dropped to his knees to get the angle on, you see his style of striking shapes and gorgeous contrasty light.
Ansel's images from Manzanar:
Manazar was one of the camps in California where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during World War II. After I left the exhibition it occurred to me that I didn't see any of Ansel's work from Manzanar. I don't think there were any there, but like I said, I had to go really quickly through everything and there were about a million people there and so I am sure I missed plenty. But I'm really glad I got to see what I did before the show is over.
*"Dr. Elmore of the High Altitude Observatory at Boulder, Colorado, put a computer to work on the problem. Using data from a visit to the site, analysis of the moon's position in the photograph, and lunar azimuth tables, he determined that the exposure was made at approximately 4:05 P.M. on October 31, 1941." via
