9781422276433

I ntroduction

As he was replacing the slide to take his final shot of the day he thought about the feeling he wanted the final print to convey, the starkness of the monumental shape before him. Ansel summoned up a mental image of how the cliff would look in the final print, with the moody cliff set against a darkened sky and the etched sharpness of the snow-capped Tenaya Peak in the far distance. Only a deep red filter would make the reality before him appear as he envisioned it. He replaced the conventional choice of a K2 yellow filter with a red Wratten No. 29(F), which required increasing the exposure by a factor of sixteen times, and released the shutter. Not until he developed the plate that evening did he realize the significance of his accomplishment. He wrote later: “I had achieved my first true visualization! I had been able to realize a desired image not the way the sub- ject appeared in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print.” What was a naturalistic rendition of the scene became an image of stark power and beauty. In the photograph the cliff becomes something elemental, looming out of the darkened sky. The viewer becomes aware of the chilly void of space, the solidity and massiveness of the rock face, and the etched perfection of the snowy peak in the background. The sharper contrast brings out hidden detail, like the fine shadows cast by the tree in the foreground, an eye-blink in time compared with the eternal presence of the black cliff face. The eye is drawn from the deep black shadows of the cliff across the gray tonalities of rock to the dazzling whiteness of the snow, emphasizing the thrust and sweep of the cliff. The scene is so tangible you can almost hear the

North Dome, Kings River Canyon The barren, somewhat lunar quality of this image recalls Ansel’s earlier Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park (1927), which he felt was his first successful visualization. In both pictures, stark black shadows give a feeling of massiveness to the cliff faces.

9