Tag Archive - Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams: I Know What Love Is

 

A portrait of photographer Ansel Adams, which first appeared in the 1950 Yosemite Field School yearbook (Photo by J. Malcolm Greany)

 

Today is Valentine’s Day–a day for candy hearts, sentimental cards, flowers, garish lingerie, and romantic dinners for two. It’s another holiday aimed at consumers, a holiday especially tortuous for my friends who are “single and still looking.”

So today, out of respect to the singles of the world, I’m bucking the trend and sharing a post that’s fit for everyone, regardless of your romantic status.

 

Ansel Adams, photographing in Yosemite National Park from atop his car in about 1942 (Photo courtesy the Cedric Wright Family)

 

The website Letters of Note is a treasure trove of interesting correspondence. I recently came across this moving letter written by the legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams in the Letters of Note archive…

In 1936, in the midst of an overwhelming workload and the near-demise of his marriage, Adams suffered a nervous breakdown. After a stay in the hospital, desperately in need of escape, Adams returned with his family to the one place where he could find solace: Yosemite, California.

Some months later, as his health returned, he wrote this letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright. A violinist and wilderness photographer, Wright was Adams’s mentor and closest friend. In his autobiography, Adams described Wright as “almost an occupant of another world and a creator and messenger of beauty and mysteries. Perhaps his greatest gift was that of imparting confidence to those who were wavering on the edge of fear and indecision; often it was me.”

 

Ansel Adams, Cedric Wright, and Adams' son Michael packing for a trip in 1941

 

June 19, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

Ansel

 

Ansel Adams, Half Dome, Merced River. Mural sized (Photo courtesy Sotheby's-Click to Enlarge)

 

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Barry Underwood: Transforming the Familiar into the Extraordinary

Photography

"Blue Trees" (Photo © Barry Underwood)

Imagine for a moment an Ansel Adams photograph. Any Adams’ image will do.

What does it look like? Do you see a landscape in black and white? Is it in a frame? Is it small? Large? Is the image on a poster pinned to a wall or displayed above a calendar page? Or do you see the landscape itself, as though it’s a real place?

It is hard to imagine what Adams’ colleagues and friends thought when they saw his photographs of Yosemite Valley, the Sierra, and other landscapes in the American West for the first time. Today, Adams’ photographs have become so commonplace, so clichéd, that it’s impossible for us to view these images with fresh eyes.

But when Adams’ images were first printed, they were novel and influential. It was his book Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, and Adams’ testimony before Congress that played a vital role in designating Sequoia and Kings Canyon as national parks in 1940.

"Autumn Moon" by Ansel Adams

 

"Orange" (Photo © Barry Underwood)

 

"McLean, Virginia" (Photo © Joel Sternfeld)

One challenge all artists face is how to create original, compelling work that is in dialogue with a medium’s history without being overly derivative. Artists are in constant battle with the tyranny of the familiar. How can a photographer working today inspire a viewer to see a landscape with new eyes when so many photographs have been made before, when our cultural memories are infused with so many popular images?

When I first saw Barry Underwood’s photographs, I was struck not only by how strange and surreal they were, but also by how familiar–familiar in the sense that they called to mind not only the landscapes of Ansel Adams, but also The Lightning Field of Walter De Maria, the sublime panoramas of the Hudson River School painters, the black and white images of Japanese photographer Tokihiro Satō, the orange pumpkins of Joel Sternfeld, and the eerie cinematic scenes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Whatever Underwood’s influences, he has been shaped by them without being consumed by them. While he may reference the work of other photographers, he has invented a visual language that is entirely his own. When I look at his remarkable photographs, I sense that I am seeing these places for the first time, and I’m intrigued, but also unnerved. It’s easy to forget how difficult an artistic accomplishment this is to achieve.

The brilliance of Underwood’s work is that it suggests a larger narrative, and yet that narrative always remains elusive and mysterious. It is this tension between the familiar and the surreal that gives his photographs their power. Underwood shows us the potential of the ordinary, in the same way a brilliant cinematographer or set designer can turn an everyday moment into a memorable, visual experience.

Photograph

"Blue Lines" (Photo © Barry Underwood)

 

"Aurora (Green)" (Photo © Barry Underwood)

 

"Outcrop" (Photo © Barry Underwood)

Underwood’s talent for creating theatrical vistas can be traced back to his undergraduate days at Indiana University Northwest, where he majored in theater and served as tech director for a year. In the end he turned down a full-time theater position, choosing to study photography at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan instead. While working at the Interlochen Arts Academy, Underwood began melding his theater experience with still images by utilizing lighting and other artistic effects in his landscape photographs.

When I spoke to Underwood about his process, he explained that all of his photographs are shot with color negative film. All of the images he made before 2007 (like “Lightning Bugs” and “Blue Trees”) were printed entirely in the darkroom with no digital processing. More recently, he has begun scanning his film negatives and making small adjustments digitally. But it is important to note that the lighting effects you see in Underwood’s images are not created in Photoshop. Underwood fashions these scenes by intuitively reading the landscape and altering the vista through lights and photographic effects. Each photograph is a sort of dialogue–the result of Underwood’s direct encounter with nature.

"Trace (Yellow)" (Photo © Barry Underwood)

 

"Line" (Photo © Barry Underwood)

 

"Lightning Bugs" (Photo © Barry Underwood)

In an interview with Donald Rosenberg, the photographer describes his process in more detail:

 

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