Blog Entry #12 - Ansel Adams Mentor

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was one of America’s greatest photographers, famous for his black and white photographs of natural landscapes of the American West, especially of Yosemite National Park.[1] His first encounter with photography was when he visited Yosemite in 1916 when he was only 14 years old and took pictures with a Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie camera from his parents. The connection he felt with the landscape there transformed his life and he returned to Yosemite each year to photograph it until his death.[2] Although Adams was trained as a concert pianist from an early age, by the age 30, he had changed his mind and chose a career in photography instead. Adams’ photographs were significant in three main ways. Firstly, because he was very artistic, Adams’ photographs helped to establish photography as an art form. His photographs were also significant because he developed photographic techniques and processes in the dark room that improved the creativity of the images. Finally, his photographs inspired an appreciation of the wilderness and became very influential in protecting it.[3]

Ansel Adams Photographing in Yosemite

One of the main reasons that Ansel Adams’ photographs were important was because he was a great artist and could bring together different elements in a landscape and produce a photograph that was a work of art. [4] In 1933 when he visited Alfred Stieglitz, a famous photographer in New York, Stieglitz said, “these are some of the finest photos I’ve ever seen”.[5] Stieglitz’s appreciation of Adams’ artistic ability played a vital role in his career and in 1936 he gave Adams his own show at An American Place. Adams had begun his career in the 1920’s with a pictorial style where the idea was to make photographs look like paintings rather than reflections of reality.[6] But by the 1930’s he dedicated himself to the principles of “pure” photography where the artistic power of a photograph came from trying to capture reality rather than avoid it.[7] He became one of the most successful photographers at achieving this through his ability to convey the full range of tones, light and texture. In 1932 he founded the Group f/64 with another photographer, Edward Weston, which was very influential in bringing the idea of pure photography to the rest of the photography world.[8]  The Mount Williamson photograph is a good example of Adams’ artistic ability because he uses the clearing storm clouds and lighting on the mountains to contrast with the sky. He manages to keep a sharp focus on both the rocks in the foreground and the distant peaks in the background to create a feeling of depth and uses shadows and tonal variations to bring out the texture of the rocks. 

Mount Williamson, The Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1945

The significance of Adams’ photographs came not only from the fact that they were artistic but because they reflected the importance Adams put on the technical side of photography as the other half of the creative process. Adams was disappointed with his first photographs which were just snapshots so he learnt how to develop his own prints and negatives and experimented with different processes in the dark room.[10]  He started in the 1920’s by using techniques that achieved the softened and blurred images of pictorialism. But in 1927 he took a pivotal photograph, called the “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome” that made him abandon the pictorial style. By using a red filter and compensating with a longer exposure time, he produced a negative in which the sky was darker and achieved the dramatic contrast with the distant white peak that he wanted in order to match what he had seen and felt, or “visualized”, at the time of taking the photograph.[11] This was the day he started to develop his theory of “visualization” that then led to his scientific technique called the “Zone system” which allowed a photographer to control and relate exposure and development in order to produce an image that matched their creative visualization at the time of taking the photograph.[12] By the end of his career, Adams had produced many of the most influential technical books on photography that had ever been written.[13]

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1927

Although Adams never set out to take his landscape photographs specifically for environmental purposes, his artistic and technical skills allowed his photographs to reflect his message that the natural world was beautiful and needed to be preserved. In this way Adams’ photographs became significant in influencing the protection of the environment from the effects of human activities.[14] Adams was criticized in the 1930’s by Henri Cartier-Bresson for not photographing humans and their social problems during the Depression, but ironically the environment became the number one issue by the end of  the century.[15] Adams influenced President Franklin Roosevelt to create the Kings Canyon National Park in 1940, after he took photographs from his book “Sierra Nevada: John Muir Trail” with him to lobby Senate on behalf of the Sierra Club, an environmental group of which he was a board director. The “Rae Lake” photograph is an example of one of the photographs from his book and demonstrates Adams’ ability to inspire an appreciation for the natural beauty of the wilderness and the need to conserve it. Adams continued to be committed as a photographer and environmentalist for the rest of his career. After his death, as a tribute to Adams’ environmental contribution, Congress set aside a vast tract of wilderness of the Sierra Nevada and named it “The Ansel Adams Wilderness”.

 Rae Lake,  Sierra Nevada: John Muir Trail,  1938

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[1] Turnage, William. "Ansel Adams Biography." Anseladams.com. The Ansel Adams

   Gallery, 2012. Web.

[2] Ansel Adams. Dir. Rick Burns. Narr. David Ogden Stiers. PBS - Warner Home Video, 2002. DVD.

[3] Sierra Club. "Ansel Adams History." Sierra Club.org. Sierra Club, 2012. Web. 7 Jan. 2012.

[4] Ansel Adams

[5] Ansel Adams

[6] Turnage

[7] Ansel Adams

[8] Turnage

[9] Hausatonic Museum of Art. "ANSEL ADAMS: Classic Images – Mount Williamson, The Sierra

   Nevada." Hcc.commnet.edu. Housatonic Community College. Web.

[10] Ansel Adams

[11] Hausatonic Museum of Art. "ANSEL ADAMS: Classic Images - Monolith, The Face of

   Half Dome." Hcc.commnet.edu. Housatonic Community College. Web.

[12] Turnage

[13] Turnage

[14] Sierra Club

[15] Ansel Adams

Blog Entry #12 - A Photograph In Ansel Adams' Style

I tried to use the things I had learnt about Ansel Adams’ photographs to take a photograph that was in his style.

Artistic Elements

Ansel Adams talked about trying to take a photo that showed how he felt about what he saw so I kept this in mind when I was composing the photo. The sun was starting to go down so I wanted to convey that feeling with the last light shining behind the row of trees. The sky had been really unusual that day with a mixture of blue and changing dark clouds so I knew I wanted to have a low enough horizon to capture that. Texture was an important part of Adams’ work and my subject area was the marsh of bulrushes and grasses dried for the winter and bent over in the wind which reminded me of large wheat field that you could run through. I framed the marsh on the right side with the trees but left it unframed to the left to give the feeling of the openness and depth that the marsh gave me. 

Techniques

I experimenting placing the tripod at different angles and tried it on the board walk and fence at different heights as I had seen that Adams spent a lot of time adjusting his body position and that of his tripod to get the angle he wanted.

He also spent hours in his dark room to produce different prints of the same negative to for example, darken the sky or accentuate spots of light. I did the same but used photoshop as my equivalent dark room to ….

Environmental Purpose

The subject of Adams’ photos was the wilderness of the Yosemite National Park which he wanted preserved. I chose Rattray Marsh for my subject because I enjoy going there to walk and enjoy the nature. The photo I took was in appreciation of  its’ environmental importance for my area which is that it is the only lakefront marsh habitat left between Toronto and Burlington and was saved from a developer who planned to fill it in and build homes.

Blog Entry #11 - Cyanotype

For my third and final alternative process, I chose to do a cyanotype, which involves using chemicals on water color paper and the sunlight outside. The final result is a blue "positive" of your image from the acetate.

I used the picture of the buildings I took in Toronto because I like how the sky really stands out because of the difference of color from the buildings. The picture has lots of different types of line in it, leading your eye around the picture. The only problem I found with using this picture is that the cyanotype turned out a little bit too light both times I tried it.