Shaoni Bhattacharya, consultant
Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, about 1937. Photograph by Ansel Adams, Courtesy of David H Arrington. Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, ? The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Every lick of foam; every droplet of spray frozen in mid-air; and the lone tree shrouded in mist high on the mountaintop above cascading waterfalls: the love affair of iconic landscape photographer Ansel Adams with water and its transformative power is revealed for the first time in a new exhibition in London.
A quintessentially US photographer, Adams is famous for his ?picture postcard? shots of the American wilderness and his seminal Autumn Moon, the High Sierra from Glacier Point, which pictures a resplendent moon hanging above eerily beautiful mountain peaks. But London?s National Maritime Museum is now showcasing his lifelong fascination with water in Ansel Adams: Photography from the mountains to the sea.
Bringing together about 100 works, some of which have never before been exhibited, the exhibition takes you through Adams?s life and evolution as a photographer, and through his fascination with the wilderness brings home the environmental impact of his work. Throughout his life, Adams?s appreciation of nature informed his photography, which fed directly into the use of his photos in the US conservation movement.
The photos on show are stunning. Black and white, magnificent yet minutely detailed, they are a testament to Adams?s feted and pioneering technical?skills as a photographer. There are famous works, like The Tetons and the Snake River, shot in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming in 1942, which is so idyllically beautiful that its image was sent into space as part of the 115 pictures on the?Voyager Golden Record aboard the exploring satellites Voyager 1 and 2 in 1977 to give any passing extraterrestrials a glimpse of life on Earth. And there are lesser known works like The Golden Gate before the Bridge, which Adams took in about 1932 from a site overlooking the entrance to San Francisco Bay, where he lived as a baby. His first memories were of the smell of salt spray from the sea, and we can conclude that this little-known work must have been special to him, as this is the photograph Adams hung above his own desk.
Adams was a member of the Sierra Club, a US grassroots conservation organisation, and petitioned politicians and presidents on conservation issues. His images were used by the Sierra Club in its push to create more national parks and halt the destruction of pristine areas. Confronted with this collection of his works, it is evident how their raw force helped power campaigns to create national parks, conserve water and protect the nation?s wildernesses.
Typical of Adams?s work, the exhibited photos have little trace of human involvement or indeed that of even larger animals. At the preview, the curator, Phillip Prodger from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, challenged me to find the two lone humans and two animals hidden (not counting barnacles and invertebrate sealife, he adds) somewhere in photos. I could not find them, even amongst the few nods to the human - a distant monastery, the odd shipwreck - scattered through his works.
In fact, Adams?s work was very much set within the modern human world, but his clever use of the camera enhances a sense of wilderness. The scant traces of human involvement are not accidental, and Adams used his photographic skills almost to erase them, at the same time heightening nature within the vast vistas he shot.
Adams was born in 1902 and the exhibition displays for the first time a photo taken by him at the tender age of 13, and rather grandly named by the teenage Adams Portals of the Past, at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. As Prodger points out, about a third of the photo is water, hinting at the elemental features he would visit again and again in his future works. But the photo is also in keeping with the photographic style of the time, pictorialism, which aimed to ape the softer edges of brushwork on paintings, soft-focused and sepia: a fuzzy, hazy version of reality.
Over time, as the exhibition shows, Adams developed the sharp black-and-white style for which he is famous. Though we think of Adams as ?picture postcard? now, for his time he was ?edgy and radical? says Prodger.
Untitled, about 1960. Photograph by Ansel Adams. Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, ? The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Adams was a founding member of a group of photographers who called themselves f/64 after the tiniest camera aperture possible. Using this aperture limited light, but gave an incredible depth of field to photos. This is evident from Adams?s work - the wave in the foreground of a picture is as sharp and clear as the rock in the midground, as are the distant peaks and falling tributaries off mountains far away. In this way, Adams?s reality is more real than anything the naked eye could deliver.
Look around the photos and you can see it everywhere - from the stark, undulating strata of bare rock faces to the crinkled wash and backwash of surf on thousand-grained beach sands.
A stunningly sharp yet mistily ephemeral photo called Clearing Winter Storm, taken in Yosemite National Park in California in 1937, is famous as a shot of the American wilderness. But its romance and wildness belies the fact Adams shot it from a parking lot, and that in fact the view should show human trails and paths etched into the mountainsides, but the camera angle chosen obscures them.
?He?s taken the exploitation of the landscape out,? Prodger told me. ?Adams loved these places. Conservation for me is about preserving them for himself and for future generations to enjoy similar sorts of things.?
As curator of the exhibition, Prodger feels any conservation messages are embedded within the beauty of Adams?s works. ?I don?t think they are political,? says Prodger. Instead, he believes they express more of an ?inverse politics?. "If you like this, go and preserve it.?
Ansel Adams: Photography from the mountains to the sea runs until 28 April at London?s National Maritime Museum
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