Art Review: Adams' photographs captured peak experience in Yosemite
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Most people have experienced something special in their lives that they've later shared with friends, and photographer Ansel Adams (1902-84) did that in style in the late summer of 1938.
Pack mules for the 10-day expedition Ansel Adams made with friends through Yosemite National Park in 1938 graze beneath a mountain range near Lyell Fork, the title of this Adams photo.
Click photo for larger image.
'Yosemite 1938: On the Trail With Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe'
Where: Works on Paper Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Art.When:Through Sept. 3, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays.
Admission: $10, $7 seniors, $6 students/children. For information, call 412-622-3131 or visit www.cmoa.org.
Adams -- whose name will be forever linked with Yosemite National Park in California for his dramatic images and his conservation efforts -- invited artist Georgia O'Keeffe and collectors David McAlpin and Godfrey and Helen Rockefeller on a back-country trip into the place that had inspired him since he was a teen.
"Yosemite 1938: On the Trail With Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe," at Carnegie Museum of Art, provides an intimate look at that venture via one of three photo albums Adams later created for the other participants using photographs he took on the trail.
The famed photographer first visited Yosemite with his family when he was 14 years old, and took some of his first photographs during that visit with a Kodak Box Brownie his parents had bought for him. Adams visited Yosemite annually after that, at times working with the Sierra Club as a trek guide. In 1937 he moved to Yosemite year-round with his wife, Virginia.
Accompanying Adams and his guests on the 10-day trip were four back-country guides and 14 mules to carry provisions and riders.
Adams began a lifelong friendship with O'Keeffe (1887-1986) when they met in 1929 at an artists' retreat near Taos, N.M. Each received acclaim while still alive for their depictions of natural areas: His, richly composed black and white photographs, particularly of national parklands; hers, paintings of abstracted, vividly colored flowers and Southwestern landscapes.
Adams had hoped O'Keeffe would paint during the excursion, but she chose not to. As all four friends served to reignite, by their enthusiasm, his momentarily depleted passion for photography, the show's title would be more accurate if it contained all of their names, or none.
However, after the trip, Adams did write to O'Keeffe's husband, Alfred Stieglitz -- himself a seminal figure in photographic history.
"To see O'Keeffe in Yosemite is a revelation, for a while I was in a daze ... She actually stirred me up to photograph Yosemite all over again ..." he wrote to Stieglitz.
And 20 years later O'Keeffe wrote Adams "In postscript -- I often think of that trip at Yosemite as one of the best things I have done ..."
McAlpin and Godfrey Rockefeller, both grandsons of financier William Rockefeller, were photograph collectors and had each purchased special cameras for the trip.
Following the excursion, McAlpin -- a businessman and philanthropist -- made donations to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art for the purchase of photographs. He also endowed a Princeton University Chair to teach the history of photography, as well as influenced, with Adams and Beaumont Newhall, the formation of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Photography.
The album exhibited (as individual framed sheets) belonged to McAlpin, who died in 1989. It was given by his wife, Sarah Sage Stewart McAlpin, to the National Museum of Wildlife Art, located near Jackson Hole, Wyo. The museum curated the show, which travels annually to only one venue.
The 48 vintage black and white silver gelatin photographs displayed are pure Adams in composition and subject, and exhibit the admirable manipulation of tone for which he was best known.
Included are Western vistas of the sort that have gained iconic status, as well as close-ups that focus on the abstract qualities of natural objects such as a tree trunk or fungus. People are generally absent.
Most unusual, and adding a unique dimension to this Adams exhibition, are the portraits and candid-appearing, if formally composed, camp shots of guests and guides. They offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the participants' experience, and indicate what Adams found significant about the 10 days.
Adams doesn't physically appear in any of the photographs. But looming in the background of four images is the mountain that was named posthumously for him, on the first anniversary of his death. Mountains aren't named after living people, but Adams knew the pinnacle pictured had been nominated to become Mount Ansel Adams. It's a fitting substitute presence, in the albums, for someone who was so enamored of the land that he'd become one with it.
The exhibition left me wanting to know more about the personal details of the excursion, which are not revealed, but the show will have special appeal to fans of Adams and those interested in the history of photography, art, the national parks and even Western settlement.
The exhibition catalog is $39.95 and includes Adams' images plus a fascinating account compiled by curator Adam Duncan Harris that offers some insight to the excursion plans and experience.
More Adams
"Ansel Adams: A Legacy," 138 photographs from the collection of Lynn and Tom Meredith, is at Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Ligonier Valley, Friday through Nov. 19. The exhibition was reviewed by the PG on May 31 (Vivid, subtle works show strong emotion in SAMA exhibits) when it was at Southern Alleghenies Loretto. For information, call 724-238-6015 or visit www.sama-art.org.
First Published August 23, 2006 12:00 am
