"Ansel Adams in Our Time" Exhibit at the De Young Museum

A report and an informal critique

This week we went to San Francisco to see the Ansel Adams in Our Time exhibit at the De Young Museum. I recommend the show for lots of reasons — its fairly broad overview of Adams’ work, the inclusion of lesser-known material is appropriate and fascinating, and Adams’ own San Francisco roots (you could walk from the exhibit to where he was raised) lend regional relevance.

It helps that the exhibit includes some of my personal favorite images, including my very favorite: “Georgia O’Keeffe and Orville Cox.” This wonderful photograph challenges preconceptions about Adams and his photography. It is utterly spontaneous, its subject is people rather than mountains, and it was made with a small handheld camera.

Some things about the attendees are worth noting, too. The size of the crowd (and, indeed, it did qualify as a post-pandemic “crowd”) is indicative of the continuing popularity and influence of Adams’ work. The mix of attendees was also fascinating. There was, of course, a large contingent of folks who are old enough to have known about Adams for decades, among them those whose orientation seems to be based on their relationships to the landscapes of the West and/or their personal background in photography. Indeed, I saw more than the usual number of folks who seemed to be carrying a camera at least in part to let others know that, “I’m a real photographer, too!” Hint: Don’t do that. ;-)

The presences of a younger contingent was a pleasant surprise. Having connections to West Coast landscape photography and photographers, I am sometimes concerned that there are so few younger photographers who seem interested in this photographic community and its focus, and even more so that they aren’t always representative of the broad community. To see small groups of young fans and photographers earnestly engaging with Adams’ work was encouraging and a sign of the continuing relevance of his photography.

In addition, and likely for a wide range of reasons (including other shows in the museum, the focus on cultural issues that weren’t traditionally addressed in considerations of Adams’ work, etc.) there was greater diversity among attendees than I might have expected… though perhaps not quite as much as I might hope. (While you are there, do visit the Kehinde Wiley: An Archeology of Silence exhibit.)

The show presents a lot of iconic Adams material including large prints of “Moonrise,” the famous photograph of a beam of light on a horse in a pasture below Mt. Whitney, the nearly abstract photograph of Mt. McKinley, many of the “Parmelian” prints, and much more. And tucked in here and there are some wonderful surprises, including a beautiful Adams print of what is essentially graffiti. Ansel Adams as a street photographer!

So, do go. You’ll find plenty to make your visit worthwhile and to make you think about Adams, the West, and the medium of photography — whether you are a knowledgable fan of Adams, encountering it for the first time, interested in diverse ways of seeing the American West, fascinated by the historical content of the show, trying to understand Adams and how it all fits together, or you just want to see a big collection of his work and ponder his influences.

But I do have a few critiques of this show, namely that. It misses an opportunity to overcome some misleading preconceptions about Adams’ work — including the popular notion that he was just a “landscape photographer.” Indeed, his landscape photographs are often beautiful (something I’ll come back to in a moment), and they had a great impact of forming many of our collective ideas about the natural world… and on the movements to protect these things.

But he was most definitely not just a landscape photographer, at least not in the usual sense of photographer of the grand landscape. A few examples in the show could havehighlighted this diversity: One of my favorites new-to-me images was a small, almost-abstract photograph of a piece of metal among the shoreline rocks in San Francisco, described by the curators as suggesting the shape of a horse’s head. Or the lovely print of graffiti inscriptions that I mentioned earlier. These things and more are in the show — credit where credit is due! — but they feel disconnected from the central notion of Adams The Landscape Icon. (Note that the photographs of those ostensibly influenced by Adams are virtually all about the landscape, even though his influence extends beyond that photographic genre.)

There’s another miss in the show that is really a shame. One popular but grossly incorrect notion about Adams is that he eschewed “manipulation” (to use the term used in the exhibit) in his photographs, which is further connected in a less-than-inaccurate way to handle his association with so-called “straight photography.” These are important issues in photography and exactly the sorts of things that curators should address when presenting a more complete and accurate accounting of artists and their work.

Contrary to some notions, the “straight photography” business is not, strictly speaking, defined by an avoidance of “manipulation.” In fact, straight photographers “manipulated” their images as much as anyone else, though perhaps in somewhat different ways. Before Adams’s time, photography was (and, frankly, still is) trying to figure out its unique place in the visual arts. Early on it was that it provided accurate way to efficiently “capture” (or, literally, “write”) objective records of visual subjects. Since then, of course, we have come to understand that this assumption of objectivity is not wholly appropriate. Another line of thought was that in order to compete with the traditions of painting, photography should try to be less “photographic” and more like painting — or as some photographers insist on putting it, more “painterly.” The “pictorialism” school was a result: intentionally soft images, staged depictions of classic scenes, and so forth.

“Straight photography,” it seems to me, can be viewed more as a counter-reaction to pictorialism’s attempts to make photography be like painting. Straight photography’s main point is to let photography be photography, to work with the ability to record with ostensible “accuracy” the light that lands on the film and — important! — not to try to emulate painting.

However, there’s nothing in that concept that precludes all sorts of “manipulation” of the image in what I like the call “optical/chemical post-production” or even in-camera. It is illogical, for example, to claim that photographers who used cameras with movements, different focal lengths, and filters did not “manipulate” their images. And darkroom processes, ranging for media choices to standard techniques like dodging and burning, are literally manipulations of the image. And they were used by straight photographers.

Moreover, Adams was (publicly and vocally!) an advocate of these “manipulations!” His famous observation (found in the show, but without this context being explicit) that the negative is the score and the print is the performance is a direct embrace of the “manipulation” that he employed in the darkroom to create the prints most associated with his photography.

This leads me to what I see as a problem. First, the show explicitly and implicitly feeds the myth that photography of the type that Adams represents “eschews manipulation.” (One statement at the show refers to “…the "straight, unmanipulated photography of Ansel Adams and his fellow modernists.”) In fact, the truth is the exact opposite: This photography relies on manipulation. Second, the term “straight photography” is not really about avoiding “manipulation” — in fact, embracing the manipulations that are intrinsic to the photographic medium is part of what defines straight photography. Finally, the show presents several famous photographs that exist in their familiar form as a direct result of Adams’ extensive post-processing manipulation without significant acknowledgement of this critical fact.

The show’s inclusion of a lovely print of his iconic “Moonrise” photograph illustrates this. Online copies of the contact print of this photograph are easy to find, and they reveal that the actual recorded image looks almost nothing like Adam’s powerful “performance” in the print. Adams radically burned down the originally gray sky to dramatic black and eliminated distracting clouds. The brilliant wave clouds over the distant mountains were dodged to increase their presence. And somehow that last bit of sunlight illuminating objects in the cemetery doesn’t seem to illuminate other similar nearby objects quite as much, if you get my drift.

Also in the show is a print of Adam’s famous “Winter sunrise” photograph of Mount Whitney with a foreground horse in a pasture illuminated by a fortuitous beam of light. It presents another obvious opportunity to shed light on this “manipulation” issue. In the print in the exhibit the line of hills between the foreground and the distant Sierra has been burned down to near blackness. But a close inspection reveals — as many Adams-aware folks know — that the Adams carefully “manipulated” the image by burning down the letters “LP” (for Lone Pine) placed on the hillside by local residents so that they are not seen.

With all of the show’s mentions of “manipulation” and “straight photography” and similar concepts, one wonders if the curators were unaware of this aspect of Adams photography… or if they did not want to think about the dissonance between these notions and the reality of his artistic practice.

Given questions in the photography world about “how far to go” with post-processing manipulation and the frequent false appeals to the Tradition of Ansel to argue for supposed “realism” over “manipulation,” this is a missed opportunity. (It is also fascinating that the show misses the opportunity to connect Adam’s own predilection for extensive post-processing and manipulation to the critical and extensive use of such things in the works by others included in the show!)

Moving on, I feel that there was one other glaring omission . The title, “Ansel Adams in Our Time” and the published statement that the exhibit “places him in direct conversation with contemporary artists and the photographers who influenced him” suggest the focus on connections between Adams and artist who influenced him and who he influenced. Indeed, the connections to those who came before him are included — lots of Carlton Watkins for example… but no Atget? And the show collects a series of later photographic artists in contexts that propose links between them and Adams.

However, it seems like an extraordinary, inexplicable and arguably tragic omission that, as far as I could tell, the many photographers who were directly influenced by Adams and could be described as his proteges are not included. Where are Alan Ross, John Sexton, Charles Cramer, Huntington Witherill, and many others of that group? What of Michael Frye, William Neill, and other contemporary folks in this tradition including newer names like Charlotte Gibb and Franka Gabler… and many, many others I could name? There’s a whole world of photographers in this Ansel-infused lineage working today… and they aren’t represented nor is this product of Ansel’s life fully acknowledged.

There’s one other aspect of Adam’s work that, I think, gets short shrift in the show: the sheer aesthetic, material appeal of his best prints. Not all of his prints achieve this, including some of the better-known images in which the subject itself seems to be “the thing.” But Adams was extraordinarily attuned to the quality of the print, and many of the best examples transcend their supposed literal subjects, working on an almost abstract level (think of the composition of the famous Mt. McKinley print) or the sheer beautify of the print itself as an object, as in the best examples of the “Moonrise” photograph.

From seeing his prints, from reading his writing, and from talking with people who knew and worked with him, it is crystal clear that the importance of producing prints that were, regardless of subject, simply beautiful objects is central to Adam’s best work. Despite including some beautiful examples (I think again of that modest little photograph of rusted metal by the seashore), this subject is not sufficiently addressed.

Let me bring this back to where I started. Yes, I have some criticisms of the exhibit, but… the show succeeds in the most important ways. One of these is that it can provoke us to think. It doesn’t provide all of the answers, and I think that an engaged viewer will walk away with thoughts about connections and with further questions. And that’s a good thing! While I don’t regard all of the contemporary work that is presented as Ansel-related to really belong here, there were several examples that spoke to me. And beyond that, the exhibit does include a remarkable collection of photographic work.

My recommendation? Go!