9781422276433

A nsel A dams

Adams came nearer to getting what he wanted with the picture Diamond Cascade, Yosemite National Park (1920), which was of a small cascade ofwater inYosemite’sTenayasCanyon.His concep- tion was not simply to capture amaterial represen- tation of the falls but somehow to express the inher- ent power ofwater inmotion, theglimmer of light on the surface, and the lightness of the spray. The fast- moving water appears as a light gray mass set against a somber background, with highlights of foamingwhitewater.Theabstract,dynamiccompo- sition of blacks, whites, and tones of gray adds another layer of meaning to the picture because the eye cannot take them in all at once and is forced to travel again and again over the surface, mimicking the flow of the water. Key to the success of the photo was first visualiz- ingthedarkvalueof thebackgroundthat setsoff the playof sunlight inwater.Adamshaswrittenthathe achieved this unity of subject and form in only a few photographs from that era.

The Transcendent World Ansel spent his next four summers working as a custodian for the Sierra Club’s headquarters, the LeConte Memorial Lodge. In 1920 he urgently tele- graphed his father: “Can buy burro for twenty including outfit. Can sell at end of season for ten. Fine investment and useful. Wire immediately as offer is for today only.” His letters from the period are filled with an exalt- ed love of the wilderness that would carry over into his photography: “I look on the lines and forms of the mountains and all other aspects of nature as if they were but the vast expression of ideas within the Cosmic Mind.... The world has suddenly opened up to me with tremendous and dazzling effect.” The effect of the spirit of place on an artist has been well documented. He described a mystical moment on Mount Clark, when the clear, early-morning light made every detail of the scene luminous and sharp, and the world seemed to fall away, giving him a keen awareness of the pure quality of light itself. Ansel’s correspondence in many ways mirrors the emotions expressed by an earlier American natural- ist, John Muir, who called the High Sierra “the Range of Light.” Muir, too, experienced a dreamlike sus- pension of time in the high mountains. In his classic book First Summer in the Sierra (1911) Muir wrote: “Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and set pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.” Ansel explored Yosemite in the days before European alpine climbing techniques had reached the United States. The gentle humor of the man can be seen in the 1981 documentary film Ansel Adams: Photographer, as he recalls the period and his climb- ing: “In the early days we nearly killed ourselves because we didn’t have any knowledge at all of climbing techniques, and we’d tie ourselves togeth- er with a piece of window sash cord and climb together. If one fell it would undoubtedly pull the other one off, but some way or another we just

Bishop Pass This image can be seen as a forerunner of Adams’s later, masterful photograph, Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California (1944). In both pictures there is a dramatic change in scale from foreground to background. Here, the center of attention is the curved horizon line between the light gray foreground and the shadowed peaks.

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