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  • Made in America
  • Nola Tully (bio)

Ansel Adams: Early Works is an exhibition of 41 intimate black-and-white vintage prints, which span the photographer’s progression from a Pictorialist or painterly style in the 1920s to his bold, modern landscapes of the American West. It also includes a selection of abstract work from the 1950s. The work comes from a private collection and contains several rare prints, including a recently re-dated print of the renowned Clearing Winter Storm.

The show contains some lesser-known works and traces the development of Adams’s style—a career that culminated in the monumental images that have become a national treasure, not only by their place in our visual language but also by their role in the fight to preserve the American wilderness. On view through mid-September 2016 at the Fenimore Art Museum, the exhibition coincides with the National Park Service centennial this summer. Nestled in the foothills of Cooperstown, New York, the Fenimore seems a particularly apt setting, a venue with a bent to honor the “extraordinary ability of ordinary people to shape American culture.” Due west of the Hudson River, on the edge of Otsego lake, the 1930’s neo-Georgian mansion houses a nice selection of Hudson River School paintings, [End Page 612] as well as the work of other early American landscape artists. These works portray the values of a rapidly changing country, and a quest for the sublime in nature in an industrial age. Adams’s early landscapes, although not directly influenced, marked the end of that era.

By the mid-1950s, Adams’s stunning black-and-white images of Yosemite National Park, Monument Valley, and other vast Western vistas proliferated in calendars and coffee table books and prints were made to order on high-gloss paper, as the advent of retail photo galleries allowed for mass production. The photographer’s career spanned six decades, and although he dabbled in documentary and commercial work, he never took his focus off the majesty and power of an American landscape that inspired him from a young age. Yet, many of his photographs from the early 1920s are relatively unknown.

Early Works features a handful of images from Parmelian Prints (1927), Adams’s first published portfolio which came at a time when photography was still an outsider to the established art world. Adams’s friend and patron Albert Bender arranged to have the Yosemite photos printed as a limited edition of 100, but the publisher Jean Chambers Moore chafed at the idea of using the word ‘photographs’ in the title. Together they chose the term “Parmelian Prints,” a fabricated name, (Parmelia being a genus of alpine lichen, although the portfolio name was more likely just a construct), a move that Adams later denounced as a “breach of faith” in his medium. And adding insult to injury, they added an “s” to the already plural Sierra. Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, semantically, was a complete affectation, yet this dubious origin became part of the lure.

Two prints from the portfolio, From Glacier Point and Sierra Junipers (both ca. 1923) have a decorative feel and the former, with a tree in foreground framing the top of the image and snow capped mountains in background, seems like a Japanese print. The dark tree trunks with spare foliage in Sierra Junipers look like brush strokes of India ink. Perhaps most significant in its soft focus and romantic style is A Grove of Tamarack Pine, (ca. 1927) a glade of the forest in sepia hues, in a soft and misty rendering. These examples remind one of the romantic prints of Gertrude Kasebier or Edward Steichen, two photographers who started in this vein and eventually moved away from artifice to champion straight photography.

Adams quickly eschewed the painterly techniques and honed his ambition for high definition, high contrast, often abstract, yet elegantly detailed landscapes. He eventually became a key figure in Group f64, a San Francisco collective of soft focus photographers turned sharp. Somewhat short-lived, the group was made of up Edward Weston, Brett Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Henry Swift, Sonya Noskowiak, John Paul Edwards, Willard Van Dyke, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson...

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