He was also part of that movement of the early 20th century, and Ansel's career really took off in the mid-20s, early 30s. And like Strand, he was part of this kind of new wave of photography that was coming along that was divorcing itself from pictorialism. If you consider the pictorialist mindset of where a lot of these pictorialist photographers were, which kind of culminated in the Steichen-Steagall School of Photography with the camera clubs, it was a group of photographers that, you know, their sole purpose was to try to get photography accepted. as an art form.
And so by doing this, and this goes as far back as Julia Margaret Cameron, they were borrowing techniques of painting and fine art, incorporating that into photography, everything from composition to the actual printing techniques to try to make this happen. What happens is Ansel comes along, and he started this group called the F64 Group. And they were really a divorce from that.
And their whole methodology, in fact, they had a manifesto that called for, quote unquote, pure photography. So what they were trying to do, was basically let photography be photography. Let the techniques come from within that. Their manifesto was a little bit hypocritical in some ways because they did do a lot of manipulation techniques. But I think the point is that a lot of these Southern California school of photographers, it was just a new way of looking at things and they were really into photography just being photography.
There's really a lot you can say about Ansel. What's interesting, and I kind of want to start this with a disclaimer, you know, he represented the Southern California School of Photographers. He came along at a time, developed an entire photography career, which really, I mean, just exploded, and he's a household name. If you consider probably two people anyone could name, even if you're not a photographer, it's usually Ansel Adams and probably, to a smaller extent, Vivian Mayer.
So he's a household name, and he worked very hard to get there. His work is incredibly stunning. And this is the disclaimer I want to make, and this is why I've kind of avoided doing a show on him for a long time. Ansel's work is meant to be seen, and there's a famous quote that I think makes sense here.
by the famous architect Mies van der Rohe, where he said, God is in the details. And I don't think there's a photographer in the history of photography that you could make the argument of that. God is in the details more than Ansel Adams. He was a master printer. He was an amazing technician of what he could accomplish in the darkroom.
And if you've ever had a chance to see these prints in person, the prints that Ansel did, or if you ever get a chance to see them, you'll know what I'm talking about. They don't reproduce well. I have several books on Adams, one that's just a monster, and none of them ever have that same impact because the print has been reproduced.
And for some reason, it takes some of those details out and it really flattens it a little bit. When you look up Ansel's work online, it just does not reproduce. Anytime you save a JPEG, you start losing.
the small details, being able to get intimate with the photograph and get close to it and see those. It's a huge deal. And I will say right now that in watching a video about Ansel Adams, that work is probably not going to reproduce and it's not going to have that same impact and effect that it has when you actually see it in person and you're presented with everything.
So anyway, that being said, it's just a small disclaimer. Try to see Ansel's work in person. He is pretty much featured in every museum in the world that has a photography collection, and there are exhibitions of his work quite often.
Anyway, without further ado, I'm going to quit talking, and let's go over and let's look at some work by Ansel Adams. Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902. Growing up in a wealthy, upper-class family, Adams first trained as a musician, starting piano and composition lessons at the age of 12. One of his composition teachers was American composer Henry Cowell. As he became increasingly serious about his musical studies, Adams was pursuing a career as a pianist in his early 20s.
As Adams states in his autobiography, his love for photography began during the family trips to Yosemite National Park. His first camera was a Kodak Brownie box camera that his father gave him during one of these trips. Adams became more interested, spending time working for a photo finisher in San Francisco and returning to Yosemite in the summer to... capture more images.
He spent much of his time reading photography magazines and becoming involved with local camera clubs. By the age of 19, Adams'first formal photographs were published, and the following year he began selling prints in his girlfriend Virginia's family gallery called Best Studio in Yosemite Valley. The studio was inherited by Virginia in 1935 and is still owned by the family today. It is now known as the Ansel Adams Gallery. In the mid-1920s, Adams started to experiment with pictorialist techniques of the time, including etching, bromoil process, and soft focus.
Adams used a variety of cameras, lenses, and techniques to get different effects, but eventually decided to reject pictorialism for a more modern, highly controlled precision of imaging technologies honing his craft in the darkroom. Adams was already proving to be a master of promotion and the business of selling his images. His first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, sold well, earning almost $4,000, over $50,000 in today's economy.
Patrons were commissioning Ansel for photographs soon after. He and Virginia soon got married, which marked the beginning of Ansel's commitment to photography and ended the pursuit of a music career. Also worth noting is that this time his darkroom is still in his parents'basement with very little space and barely adequate equipment.
The 1930s proved to be a very productive and intense part of Adam's career. He began shooting new locations, and while in New Mexico, he befriended many of the notable artists from Stieglitz's inner circle, including George O'Keefe, John Marin, and Paul Strand. Strand was an enormous influence on Adams, and pushed him to advance his work to an even more intense level.
In 1931, Adams got his first solo museum show at the Smithsonian Institution. The show proved highly successful, and reviews from the Washington Post were stellar. The following year, Adams was part of a group show at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco.
Also in the show were works by Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston. The three photographers decided to form Group F64. Group F64 was extremely significant to the advancement of photography. It proved a modern alternative to the Steik and Stieglitz camera clubs and opened up attention to a new Southern California school of photographers.
Group F64 promoted, quote, pure and straight photography over the popular pictorialism of the time. In contrast to the pictorialist view of borrowing techniques from paintings and other art forms, the group F64 Manifesto encouraged photography to be pure of itself and not borrow from other mediums for the goal of acceptance. Adams opened his own art gallery in San Francisco at the age of 31. He pushed his career hard as he started publishing essays and his first instructional books.
He also became very active in wilderness preservation and published a book resulting and the designation of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park in 1940. A trip to New Mexico in 1941 yielded one of Adams'most famous images, Moonrise over Hernandez. Adams claimed he wasn't prepared when he came across the scene. He used the luminance of the moon to manually determine the exposure.
The negative was still difficult to print, but Adams'craftsmanship prevailed, and the image was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. Over a period of 40 years, Adams made over 30,000 images. 1,300 unique prints of the image, which by the 1970s had totaled over $25 million in sales. Adams sustained a nearly 60-year careers of fine art and commercial photographer. He became known as an author, publishing his formal techniques and approaches to photography and printing. He formed the photography department at the San Francisco Art Institute, and in the 1950s was on a monthly retainer with Polaroid, who was founded by his friend Edwin Land.
In the 1970s, he had a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was commissioned by President Jimmy Carter to make the first official presidential photograph for the White House. Adams'accomplishments were unprecedented in the history of photography. Along with Fred Archer, he pioneered the zone system, which was a technique for transferring light into formal measured densities for negatives and printing processes.
This was a major formalized process approach to black and white darkroom photography and is still used today. Adams died in 1983 at the age of 82, leaving behind an enormous legacy and is still a household name today. Okay, so I want to look at some pictures by Ansel Adams, and I'm going to start with this one, which is a picture of Ansel Adams, but the two images above his head, and this is where I want to start. These are both two different prints of the famous Moonrise Over Hernandez piece that he was very well known for in his career.
Now, depending on what stage of his career you asked him, Ansel had some varying stories on this, but more or less what the deal was is he was in New Mexico near Hernandez, which is a little bit north of Santa Fe. You know, it kind of sits between a couple national parks and a national forest, and saw this scene and thought, what a photograph, pulled over to get the photograph. Could not find his light meter for whatever reason and was not able to, you know, apply the zone system to creating this negative.
So what he did do... is apparently he used the moon and he exposed for that. Understanding how to calculate the luminance of the moon, much like you would with the Sunny 16 rule, he exposed for the moon. Now you can see with these two prints over his head here, the one on the left is the straight negative, and the one on the right is after a lot of experimentation and manipulation in the darkroom.
And I like this because I think this illustrates the master craftsman in the darkroom that Ansel was and just how good he was. You can see that on the left-hand side, I know it's pretty small on the video, but there's clouds that sit right over the horizon. There's some density issues there.
They're a little too bright. There's not enough contrast between the sky and the little village below. I think when you do look at the village that's in the foreground, it doesn't stick out enough, and it's just not the same picture. It's not a great picture. Then after much...
manipulation, much experimentation in figuring it out. He learned how to print from that negative, which was not ideal, and came up with the image that you see on the right-hand side. And I do have a bigger version of that that I'll show you, and this is the final. And you can see this is just a fabulous image. And, you know, even though the zone system and a lot of what Ansel pioneered with Fred Archer in developing that, you know, the whole idea is to make your life easy in the darkroom and learning how to manipulate the negative in order to...
easily get a print without having to spend a lot of time, you know, editing what it is that you're doing. And I think this picture is absolutely beautiful. I love the way that he was able to get the contrast in the little village that you see in the foreground.
Well, it's not really a village with this little series of houses here and the little crosses just going bright white and the amount of detail. I love the way that the sky above those mountains, it looks like, you know, maybe a paintbrush or something. And of course the moon is... a big part of this image too but you can see just you know how amazing Ansel was with this and I'm sure this picture was taken at some session where he was talking about working with this negative but you can clearly see that the image you know the straight print from that negative on the left hand side was just you know nowhere near what the final was. And this was one of his, you know, hottest selling images.
He literally made millions off of this. And I think he made over 1300 prints of this throughout his career. So pretty amazing.
Another famous image by Ansel is this one. This is the Half Dome at Yosemite. This is a famous scene.
This particular Half Dome has been photographed by other people as well. And Ansel also had a story about this one. This was another one of his big selling prints.
And apparently, and I remember reading about this in his autobiography, which is quite good. Ansel's a fun guy. He's easy to read and loved life, loved photography, loved making prints.
He was on a hiking expedition with several friends, as I recall, and reading. And basically, he had two sheets of film left in his 4x5 camera that they were hiking with. He exposed the first one and then just for grins popped a red filter over the lens and took the second. And you can see the impetus of beginning to control the negative in order to get an easier print to make comes out in this because of the high contrast. And that's what a red filter does.
It takes blues and turns them dark and it creates a lot more contrast in the image. And the half dome is a beautiful image. Pretty much an icon of Yosemite National Park in a lot of ways, and you know, it really just, the America landscape and Americana and what Ansel was doing during his career, particularly that early part, I think a lot of those elements are present here.
Another image that I think really shows off the maturity and possibilities of what one can do using the zone system is this, and it's a fairly simple image, it's just a couple trees in the foreground and all you see is the trunks here as they spread towards the back but the way the light works in here and the way that Ansel manipulates the light is what makes this a beautiful image the clarity the sharpness the contrast everything is just so perfect and this scene I you know it's hard to say what it looked like when Ansel saw it but the way he was able to manipulate into this it looks like just a subtle amount of light Ansel did like to work with long exposures small apertures to get just the maximum sharpness step the field He liked to print large and another absolutely stunning image. This has always been one of my favorites of Ansel. There's some others too where he just kind of did these simple studies of foliage, elements of nature and were really able to manipulate the light in a way and the contrast in a way that really just made them sing and this certainly is one of those.
Another very famous image of his and this has always been a favorite of mine. And this is Snake River in the Grand Tetons. And if you've ever been up to Jackson Hole, you fly into the airport and then you have to drive into Jackson Hole and you kind of go through a lot of this. It is some of the most breathtaking landscape and scenery that I've ever seen.
Jackson Hole is one of the most beautiful places on the planet that I've ever been to. And Snake River is beautiful. And I love this image. There's a lot of things that I think come together in this image.
And just, you know, the contrast is beautiful. The way... you kind of have these storm clouds that are starting to blow through and the way that contrasts with these clouds with the snow peaks. the river in the foreground, you know, the foliage and the trees that, you know, on the bottom left-hand side of the picture are burned into where they really go dark. And so you really have a nice balance of contrast in this image, and it has a beautiful way of your eye being led through the image.
Probably a lot of burning was obviously done in that foreground, as were the clouds, to really bring out that contrast and that detail. And it's a beautiful image. And as I said, if you've ever been to Jackson Hole, it is just absolutely stunning as far as scenery goes up there.
One of my favorite images that Ansel did. You see a lot of reproductions of this image. And as I kind of mentioned earlier, Adams, for a lot of reasons.
You know, when you consider photography to be this medium where he obviously made a lot of prints, his work really does not reproduce well. And I've done the best I can in the video, and I found the best scans of these that I could find. But these were actually taken from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website.
And they're tough, and it's hard to reproduce his work and capture that essence. But anyway, you've got to go see it in person. I want to end with this image. This is Maynard Dixon, who was a fellow artist.
He was a painter, and he was part of that Southern California school of artists that was going on and spent time in the southwest of the United States. Ansel, and the reason I'm ending on this is this is very un-Ansel in a lot of ways. Ansel is mostly known for these beautiful landscapes that he shot.
Ansel did work as a commercial photographer, and he also did some portraits. He worked a lot with medium format and some other formats as well, and even did some color work. Clearly landscapes were his thing and he was so good at that.
If you're familiar with Ansel's work you probably know what I'm talking about when I say that his portrait work was nowhere near as consistent. Some of them are just... none of them are bad but they're just not on the level that his landscape work was. But when he was on, he was on and I think this image illustrates that. I think there's so much interest going on with the light in this composition.
The subject has such an interesting face, the beard with the plant in the foreground and then also the stick over on the side. And this image is very American in a lot of ways and it really starts to bring in, and I think Ansel would hate hearing me say this, but it starts to bring in a lot of that painterly-like quality and Americana into his work. If you look at the painters like Andrew Wyeth, it's that kind of composition and that kind of poignant portrait. and what I love about that so much is one it's very unancel and two this one's extremely good the other thing that's interesting and I don't know if you're going to pick this up on the video or not but there is a screen that this is being shot through so you do have this beautiful texture that happens over here and this was not an easy shot to get I think that screen texture was difficult I think manipulating the light in a way I don't know what kind of work was done on the the print side of this, but I think it's a beautiful image and very, very exceptional for an Ansel Adams portrait image. A lot of his images were more straight on.
And anyway, what I was saying about, you know, Ansel would hate this painting comparison that I'm doing is that, you know, in the history of photography. really around the turn of the century, into the 20th century, in the early 1900s, you have this movement of pictorialism, and you have, you know, the Steichen-Steagall school of trying to get photography accepted as fine art, and so they were borrowing or trying to emulate a lot of techniques found in other mediums. Now, in F64, the group with Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams came around, their manifesto was called for what they called, quote unquote, pure photography.
And so it was, you know, understanding how to just use the camera to be beautiful for photography's sake. And I understood what they were going for. You know, it is a little bit, you know, hypocritical in some ways because, you know, Ansel actually did use red filters.
He used a ton of manipulation in the darkroom. So, you know, it wasn't exactly the, quote unquote, pure photography that he was talking about. But I do understand what they were saying with that. They were learning how to let photography be photography and how to manipulate it as such and what to do with black and white photography, how to produce a negative, how to have control over that and how to start becoming an artist with photography.
And I think that is the most important thing that you can deduce from from Group F64. I think the other thing that makes it extremely significant, you know, I think, you know, any photographer in history, their work tends to reflect the environments that are around them. And if you compare the New York school with the Southern California school. You know, New York is a little bit darker.
It deals with urban landscapes. It deals with city life and a lot of people. And, you know, the Southern California School was shooting, you know, other artists and a lot of landscapes and kind of what they were exposed to, too.
But it provides a really interesting balance that I believe propelled photography from a fine arts side, you know, up to the 1930s in those days. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, Paul Strand was an enormous influence on Ansel Adams. And I think that was really important, too. You see that in these higher contrast images, certainly.
And apparently the two became friends, and Strand just drove Ansel to work even harder. He just thought the world of Strand and was always trying to strive to that level that he saw in his hero like that. So anyway, that's the work of Ansel Adams. I will link up, if you look in the video description, to some links.
We've got some stuff on Pinterest where I've collected a lot of these images if you want to explore further. Despite the fact that everything has been shrunk and presented to you in a video, I hope I've at least represented a lot of what I believe makes Ansel Adams such an amazing photographer. And I want to bring a personal note.
into this one as well. Ansel to me means a lot of things and you know I think photography it's a lot of things and when you consider that photography yes there is an artistic sense and we talk about that a lot in the show but photography is not only art composition. It is dealing with light.
So it has elements of chemistry involved. It has elements of physics involved. It has, you know, the whole craft of the darkroom and making a print and all these things that come together.
And then there's an education side. And then there's, you know, all the things that Ansel did. And he really did fire on all cylinders.
He was one of the early photographers who was just more than willing to share what he did in workshops, lectures. writing for magazines, publishing books. And he and Fred Archer, when they established the zone system, really had a legitimate formalized method that really hadn't existed in photography up to that point, and a way of doing things in a very precise way and being able to control and be able to understand and know what to expect in terms of results.
And I think that's really important to talk about. Personally for me, when I started learning how to develop film and do darkroom printing, I was very fortunate in that I studied with a guy who lives here in Dallas named Michael Billard. And I took a workshop.
It was a whole series of classes over a summer with Michael. And Michael was a former student of Ansel's and, you know, probably drove him nuts because I always had lots of questions about, well, what did Ansel say about, you know. Because, you know, here we are learning darkroom printing with black and white.
And, you know. You've got a connection to the master there. And Michael was very helpful to me. And a lot of what he taught in going back and revisiting a lot of Ansel, it was really second-generation Ansel Adams. But that's really where a lot of my formal grounding happened.
And it's amazing how well thought out all those concepts were and really what a genius Ansel Adams really was. A lot of how you approach a print. Then there's certain aspects of Ansel that are almost untouchable. The fact that he was a complete juggernaut in terms of producing.
producing his work. He was highly prolific. He made thousands and thousands of prints during his lifetime. And the print was just as big a component as the composition, as the scene, as the manipulation of light and everything else that went into it. And Ansel was a genius on that level.
What's interesting is I think that Ansel's impact on photographers has dulled a little bit in recent years. And maybe this is just a perception on my behalf, I'm not sure. But it seems to me that, you know, Ansel's place in time and what's come since, we've seen photography, particularly landscape photography, go in a little bit of a different direction. If you consider modern photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Michael Kenna has had a huge influence and an impact in taking the aesthetics of what a landscape photograph is into a different direction. And Ansel's work is a little bit, because of those photographers, fallen out of fashion somewhat.
And that's not to... You know, say anything negative about either one, but I think that photographers are less influenced by Ansel now because, you know, his work represents a little bit more of an old school aesthetic. Sometimes, you know, it's just, it's not as modern, it's not as contemporary.
And Ansel had a 60 year career, but I think it's really important to consider what he did for photography as an industry, what he did for photography as craft. what he did for photography as a whole and for those reasons you know I'm very influenced by Ansel and you know he he provides this you know high benchmark of what you want to strive to do with photography and that control that you want to have over it and basically that whole concept of pre-visualization and then letting that lead out into artistic expression and really what you're doing as a photographer as an artist so anyway all that to say that is Ansel and thank you guys for watching another episode of the art of photography I'll see you guys in the next video later