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Ansel Adams

In copyright1902-1984·American·photography·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was born in San Francisco and died in Monterey, California. He photographed Yosemite and the American West in large-format black and white for more than half a century, joined the Sierra Club at seventeen and later served as one of its directors.

Why they matter

Adams made the case that a straight, sharp photograph could be as deliberate as a painting. He co-founded Group f/64 in 1932 with Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, and around 1939-40 worked out the Zone System with Fred Archer, a method for deciding at the moment of exposure what every tone in the final print will be. His pictures of the national parks also became the public image of American wilderness.

What to buy

Adams died in 1984 and his work is in copyright, so every reproduction should be licensed. Prints: the cheapest honest way in is a licensed poster, but a poster flattens exactly the tonal range he spent his life on. The real middle tier is the Yosemite Special Edition series, sold by the family-run Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley. Adams chose the images in the 1950s and held their negatives back from his archive so they could keep being printed. They are hand-made silver gelatin prints from his own negatives, but know what you are getting: early ones carry his full signature, from 1972 he only initialled them to show he had not printed them himself, and since 1975 they have been printed by his former assistant Alan Ross and stamped on the back. A Special Edition is not a print by Adams, and a dealer who blurs that is telling you something. Prints he made himself are an auction-house market. Beware anything sold as "lost" Adams negatives: 65 glass plates bought at a Fresno garage sale were promoted as his, the Adams trust disputed it, and under a 2011 settlement they may not be sold under his name. Books: Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs, edited by Andrea G. Stillman, who worked with him, covers the whole career from 1916 onward in one volume.

Notes

His archive is at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. MoMA, the Met, LACMA, the Getty and the Whitney all hold prints of Moonrise. Because he reprinted his best negatives for decades, museum labels give two dates, when the picture was made and when that print was made; the gap matters to value and to how the print looks.

Story

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico was very nearly not taken. Late one afternoon Adams saw the moon rising over the village of Hernandez, its church and the white crosses of the cemetery still lit by the sun, and could not find his exposure meter. Then, as he later wrote, he realised he knew the luminance of the moon, 250 candles per square foot, placed it on Zone VII of his own system and worked out the exposure in his head. When he tried for a second exposure he was a few seconds too late: the sunlight had left the crosses. Adams could not remember the date. The astronomer Dennis di Cicco finally worked it out from the position of the moon: 4:49:20 in the afternoon of 1 November 1941. The negative was hard to print, so prints from before 1970 are rare, and Adams eventually remade it with more contrast. Over nearly forty years he made more than 1,300 prints of that single exposure, each one reinterpreted, most of them sixteen by twenty inches.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

The Met ↗Art Institute of Chicago ↗V&A ↗LACMA: Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico ↗

Prints

eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

Bookshop.org ↗AbeBooks ↗Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (Little, Brown) ↗Amazon ↗

See also

Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908-2004Agnès Varda 1928-2019Robert Capa 1913-1954Augusto De Luca b. 1955Carlos Saura 1932-2023Robert Doisneau 1912-1994Annie Leibovitz b. 1949Lee Miller 1907-1977

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