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Shedding new light on Ansel AdamsMoMA show part of centennial celebration of photographer
From Phil Hirschkorn
NEW YORK (CNN) -- A career retrospective of one of greatest 20th-century photographers has returned to the United States. Ansel Adams, whose black-and-white pictures are iconic images of the American West, is being celebrated in an exhibit that opened Friday and will be on view through early November at the Museum of Modern Art in Queens, the last stop on an international tour. Museum curators organized the show, "Ansel Adams at 100," for the centennial anniversary of Adams' birth last year. It premiered in his native San Francisco, California, and traveled to Los Angeles, Chicago, Berlin and London before reaching New York. The exhibit offers more than 100 prints revealing Adams' intense experience with the natural world. "When you look at a good Ansel Adams photograph, you think you know the temperature, the relative humidity, the month," said exhibit curator John Szarkowski. Adams' prints are studies of landscape and sky, and the changing conditions of both. "He photographed not so much geography as weather," Szarkowski said. Adams returned to the same locations again and again -- from Yosemite, Sequoia and Glacier national parks in the Northwest to the Grand Canyon in the Southwest -- capturing the peaks, valleys and lakes throughout the seasons. "We would walk across a meadow in Yosemite, and he would just stop and look up," recalled Bill Turnage, a friend of Adams'. "There were clouds, and he'd just look at me and say, 'My God, it is so wonderful.' And he'd been coming to the same meadow for 65 years." Trained for the concert hall
Born in 1902 to a well-to-do family that controlled a lumber business, the young Adams trained to be a concert pianist but drifted from music at 14, when his parents took him on a trip to the Yosemite Valley and gave him a Kodak camera. Photography and hiking became his obsessions, and Adams began producing albums of his outings with the Sierra Club. In his 20s, Adams launched a career that would span five decades, seeing the camera evolve from glass plates to film. A steady flow of books, exhibitions and academic positions followed. Adams had an eye not only for the wide shot but the close-up -- the cactus, tree stumps, flowers growing from a crevice between rocks or grass floating on water. An environmentalist, Adams capitalized on his fame to lobby Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter for better conservation policies. "They felt they were in the presence of someone who wasn't interested in advancing himself, who wasn't interested in getting elected to something -- someone who simply loved America and loved the American wilderness," said Turnage, who accompanied Adams to visit Ford at the White House in 1975. Adams' motive, behind his political activism and his work, was simply a love of the beauty around him, according to friends. "He was trying to say to you or to me what he felt at the moment when he made the photograph," Turnage said.
Adams had a keen technical grasp of his craft, once calculating during a drive across New Mexico how the moonlight was affecting the scenery. "He saw this incredible band of clouds and the moon, and he slammed on the brakes," Turnage said. The result, without a light meter, was "Moonrise: Hernandez, New Mexico," one of his best-known images. "He literally got it with 10 seconds to spare," Turnage said. In 1980, Carter awarded Adams the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. After Adams died in 1984, U.S. Sens. Alan Cranston and Pete Wilson sponsored a congressional act that designated 100,000 acres of California as a wilderness area. The next year an 11,000-foot peak in Yosemite was named Mount Ansel Adams. "People don't think of landscapes as moving, but they do," Szarkowski said. "The light changes, the clouds move, and that's what Adams' photography is really about -- about the fact that nature is not permanent."
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