"No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied - it speaks in silence to the very core of your being."
This quotation, printed grandly on the first wall of the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, offers visitors a powerful first impression of the world-renowned photographer. He is seen as a sensitive artist, moved and inspired by the grandeur of the natural world.
This statement is also a perfect beginning to the extensive show, as the magnificence so commonly associated with Adams' photographs is attributed chiefly to his skill in translating rare emotional experiences to viewers who have never visited a national park, much less scaled a snow-covered mountain.
The exhibit features 180 black-and-white photographs from the Lane Collection, the largest private holding of Adams' work, as well as books, albums, folding Japanese-style screens, large-scale prints and two films. The photographs document the American landscape through the 20th century and are presented chronologically in seven sections: Early Work, Group f/64: Exploring Straight Photography, Yosemite, The American Southwest, Alfred Stieglitz and New York, The National Parks, and Late Work and Screens.
With his innovative dedication to the value of photography, Adams played a key role in establishing the medium as an art form equivalent to the fine arts of drawing and painting. Since this transformation in the way the art world viewed photography, Adams has become a household name, his work shown through the world.
Although Adams is primarily celebrated as the man who captured dramatic, turbulent vistas from impossibly high mountaintops, the MFA exhibit reveals a lesser-known side to the artist. Within the show, there is a juxtaposition of subject matter which is hard to ignore. By hanging the majestic view of "Winter Sunrise," which crests over the Sierra Nevada, opposite the intimate still life of "Rose and Driftwood," which Adams referred to as a visual exploration of "the small and commonplace," the viewer discovers a similarity in grandeur between the two very different compositions.
There is a historical quality to the show as well: most of the photographs boast captions explaining their place in Adams' life, whether he was hiking with the Sierra Club, documenting for the government, or intermittently shooting for museums and magazines. Overall, the show gives visitors a more comprehensive understanding of the photographer's personality and brilliance as an artist as it teaches about the ways he experimented with different sizes and ways of printing, and the way his early life influenced his style.
The first photograph on display is "Wind, Juniper Tree, Yosemite National Park," taken in 1919 and printed in a Pictorialist style, romantic and softly focused so as to mimic the quality of oil paintings. This style was common at the time and gives us a standard starting point from which to compare his late, abstract work and the glossy, "straight photography" method he would eventually adopt.
Most striking about Adams is his extreme deliberateness in what he called the "visualization" of the image, where he would anticipate the final photograph before taking it. He used these intentions to calculate the necessary amount of exposure, the setup of the composition, what type of filter, and even what texture the paper should have to bring across the effect he envisioned. The exhibit emphasizes this painterly characteristic of Adams' work, explaining his artistic process to those who could not recognize it just by looking at the photograph.
One way the curators call this to our attention is with "Monolith - The Face of Half Dome," taken at Yosemite in 1927. The photograph could easily stand alone: a breathtaking view of a cliff stretching across the page and separated from the moody sky by only a thin line of snow, we are hopelessly awed by the lonely landscape, feeling small and inconsequential in the face of nature's magnificence. The caption explains that Adams, with only two negatives left at the end of the day, waited for the light to fall and took the first negative with a yellow filter. But then, with a kind of epiphany, Adams realized that a deep red filter and longer exposure would best convey the emotional view.
This theme of Adams' artistic vision follows us through the exhibit so that at the end, where we see his evolution into more abstract images, we understand the "microscopic revelation of the lens" Adams talks about. As a result, his struggle with spirituality in the modern age of the loss of nature and purity is equally apparent. At the MFA we truly discover Adams' brilliance and innovativeness, gaining insight into his activism, his humor, and his role as a pioneer in composition, method, and technique.
