Shooting straight

Ansel Adams at the PMA brings art, history, spirituality, and the Western landscape into deep focus

by Clif Garboden

"IN PRAISE OF NATURE: ANSEL ADAMS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE AMERICAN WEST," At the Portland Museum of Art, from January 19 through March 19.

Ansel Adams focused on the details, but he didn't find just God there. The modern photographer's landscapes of the American West embody a jumble of nonconformist philosophies that have reflected and inspired our national character since the early 19th century. When they're taken out of context, it's easy for the perfection and surface beauty of Adams's prints to distract viewers from the photography's intended subtext. But traditions of neo-pantheism, deism, and transcendentalism that run through American thought from William Cullen Bryant through Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and John Muir come together in Adams's works and carry them well beyond the level of scenic decoration. The pictures become mystical expressions, cultural summations, and defining icons of America, derived from our full historical spectrum of art, politics, and religion.

Exhibit highlights Weighing in at 150 photographs, "In Praise of Nature" can overwhelm a casual viewer. The unusual mix of art prints and the documentary photographs that inspired its genre makes for a show that's multifaceted and challenging. The exhibit catalogue provides a solid (if wordy) orientation that will help you to trace the trends of philosophy, culture, and art history running through the exhibit. Some highlights follow. The pioneers Many of the early photo chroniclers of the American West were studio-trained photographers who perfected location-shooting techniques on Civil War battlefields. They used large-format view cameras to capture images on fragile glass-plate negatives that had to be exposed wet and developed on the spot. These photo pioneers explored the uncharted wilderness leading pack mules carrying hundred of pounds of equipment, portable darkrooms, and gallons of chemicals. They were a colorful and resourceful lot. Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), a bookseller, born Edward Muggeridge, worked with San Francisco photographer/gallery owner Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) and produced a critically acclaimed portfolio of large-format prints of Yosemite. Muybridge is better known for his rapid-fire sequences of photographs (taken using a battery of 12 cameras) of a trotting horse; that led to his invention (in 1878) of the zoogyroscope, a device that projected his image sequences as moving pictures. (He later gained additional fame for murdering his wife's lover.) Works by both Muybridge and Watkins are included in the exhibit. Watkins's Glacier Point Rock, 3201 Feet is one of the few images in the show to incorporate human figures (included for scale). Muybridge's Valley of the Yosemite, from Rocky Ford, ca 1872 provides a striking technical and stylistic contrast to Ansel Adams's Winter Storm, Yosemite Valley, 1937. William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) was spiritual kin to Adams and the Western Modernists. Jackson was steeped in existentialist writings, and his photographs, taken for numerous survey expeditions, mirror the 19th-century belief that God, nature, and salvation were somehow of a piece. To contemporary audiences, his early-1870s photo of the previously only rumored Mountain of the Holy Cross, a peak marked by a permanently snow-filled cross-shaped rock-formation, exemplified the "Christian" associations with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny -- a cultural/political connotation largely lost in the history of Western expansion. Jackson's 1871 photos of Yellowstone helped persuade Congress to create our first National Park. In 1937 and in 1942, while Jackson was still alive, his work was exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Religious iconography abounds in his prints; see Cathedral Spires, c. 1880. Timothy O'Sullivan (1840-1882) was rescued from relative obscurity by Ansel Adams, who influenced MOMA photo curator Beaumont Newhall to exhibit his work in a 1937 history-of-photography show. O'Sullivan apprenticed with Mathew Brady during the Civil War and later surveyed the West before returning East, where he died young, of tuberculosis. Adams loved O'Sullivan, and he honored him, in 1942, by reshooting O'Sullivan's 1873 view of Ancient Ruins, Canon de Chelle. Both prints are included in the show. Comparing details unchanged over seven decades triggers visions of the staggering timescape implicit in the Western landscape. The contemporaries In addition to Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, "In Praise of Nature" includes photos by their contemporaries who established and refined the straight-photography esthetic. Keep in mind that related genre upheavals were taking place in New York but the Western Landscape movement was a West Coast scene centered on San Francisco. Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) made the transition from soft-focus Pictorialist (Voice of the Wood, 1910; Evening on the Duwamish River, 1910-1915) to Modernist. You can watch the transition bloom in her 1925 floral detail Exploding Bud. Paul Strand (1890-1976) was an outsider -- a New Yorker who had turned the corner into straight photography as early as 1916. Strand was versatile and widely influential. He experimented with candid photography, pioneered extreme close-up work (of machinery, not flowers), and set modern standards for travel-documentary and people photography. Adams credited Strand with convincing him to make photography his life's work. Strand's Dunes near Abiquiu, New Mexico, 1931 stands out among this show's photos for its nontraditional composition. Brett Weston (1911-1993), son of Edward Weston, grew up amid the Group f.64 crowd. He and his brother took over printing his father's backlog of negatives in 1948 when Edward Weston fell victim to Parkinson's disease. Brett Weston's own work -- see Untitled (cactus), 1932; Untitled (dunes), 1936 -- lends a more contemporary flavor to the exhibit by exploiting natural shapes to create abstract designs. These photographs either bring us closer to the symbolic language of nature or impose artificial meaning on it, depending on your critical/philosophical bent. Either way, they reflect Brett Weston's father's own departures (Surf at Orick, North Coast, 1938) from the panoramic compositions favored by Adams.

That message is the genius behind "In Praise of Nature: Ansel Adams and Photographers of the American West," which opens at the Portland Museum of Art this Wednesday, January 19. The touring exhibit, organized by Ohio's Dayton Art Institute, includes 150 photographs of the American West -- 69 by Adams, the remainder by 25 other photographers -- spanning 1860 to 1960. Hanging Adams's prints amid works by pioneer Western photographers from the mid 1800s and modern interpretations by Edward Weston and other Adams contemporaries puts his familiar images in deep perspective. The gorgeous exhibit catalogue's somewhat magpie assault on the complex web of influences, confluences, and contexts that defines the major points of the show is mind-boggling. But then, it's not an easy thing to explain.

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Arizona Route 179 between Interstate 17 and Sedona is lined with rough turnouts that have been eroded into the desert's edge by decades of tourists parking their rental cars to take in the views. All kinds of travelers -- teenagers, middle-aged business types, retired couples, car-weary families -- pull off and aim an equally diverse collection of cameras, from disposables to full-blown Nikons, at the geological spectacle of red-rock mesas that flank that highway. Some tourists pose one another in front of the scenery; others capture the landscape straight. Few are striving for art. Most, at best, achieve postcards. But the urge to photograph -- to engage, somehow to possess -- something so dwarfing, alien, and beautiful is irresistible and universal.

Everyone's touched by the scenery. Some are merely agog at the sheer magnitude and color of the rock formations. Others make note of the series of high-water marks left by long-gone oceans ringing the mesas and feel oddly nostalgic for the Paleozoic. And others go straight to a less-defined spiritual connection that is some combination of those reactions. Gaping and snapping. It's a familiar scene throughout the West. The wilderness terrain varies from flat expanses that look like God's abandoned construction sites to similarly severe, but fertile, high ground. But desert or mountain, the intimidating scale and the evidence of great forces at work are powerful. If you grew up in the soft, water-rich East, the sights are literally otherworldly. Tourists are awestruck -- each in his or her own way comprehending the landscape in terms that can only be called religious.

This is nothing new. The 19th-century surveyors who explored this frontier for white America had their racial memories similarly stirred. In their expeditionary journals, more than one was moved to poetry. References to a New Eden and comparisons of natural landmarks to cathedral architecture abound. Whatever economic and geographic reports they brought home, many explorers returned East convinced they'd almost touched the Almighty, or at least seen His handiwork in some primal state. The photographers who accompanied the survey teams, toting hundreds of pounds of photo equipment and recording the landscape on glass-plate negatives, likewise approached the American frontier with a seemingly inseparable mix of documentation and spirituality. And everyone, it seems, mixed expansionist politics and religion -- at least to the point of justifying their presence through the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

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Ansel Adams was well aware of his place in this tradition of American Western photography. Born in San Francisco in 1902, he grew up set on being a musician (he studied piano) and didn't turn to photography as his life's work until 1930. But photography and his love of nature coincided early. At age 14, he took his first camera, a Kodak #1 Box Brownie, on a family trip to California's Yosemite National Park. (Three prints from that first outing are included in the PMA show.) From his early years, his father's interest in Emersonian thought and an introduction to the writings of Walt Whitman and the less-celebrated British philosopher/mystic Edward Carpenter inspired Adams to experience nature symbolically. In 1927, when he met New York photographer Paul Strand on a trip to New Mexico, he recognized photography as the perfect medium through which to express his ideas.

Backed by a wealthy California patron, Adams soon published his first portfolio, and while working as a commercial photographer in San Francisco, he made inroads into the arena of serious American art photography. He authored an instruction manual, Making a Photograph, that was published in London; in 1936, his work was shown in New York by contemporary photography's then-central figure, Alfred Stieglitz. Later, Adams taught photography and curated shows, notably a 1940 exhibition titled A Pageant of Photography for the San Francisco International Exposition, for which he unearthed works by several of the 19th-century Western-survey photographers that are included in "In Praise of Nature." Meanwhile, he had become a mainstay for a group of innovative photographers who had organized under the name Group f.64.

"In Praise of Nature" serves as an excellent document of Adams's place in the larger history of photography. Group f.64 took its name from the lens-aperture setting used to produce detailed photos in ultra-sharp focus, a significant idea because it represented a departure from the art-photography norm of the day.

In the decades following the introduction of photography, in 1839, practitioners, pundits, and critics wrestled with the thorny issues of craft versus art, verisimilitude versus abstraction, and documentation versus interpretation. Before long, photography's first "esthetic school," since named Pictorial, emerged. Its champions maintained that photography could be art only if it aped the styles and techniques of traditional mediums, such as painting. Although valid photographs were made under the Pictorial banner, the movement is best remembered for pretentious gimmicks, overblown staged melodrama, and endless soft-focus scenes of nymphs prancing through the woods. (A tame, almost palatable, example, The Dying Cedar, by highly regarded Pictorialist Anne W. Brigman, is included in the PMA exhibit.) Adams and his contemporaries (including Imogen Cunningham, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, filmmaker Willard Van Dyke, and art-photo godhead Edward Weston, all of whom are represented in "In Praise of Nature") were themselves schooled in Pictorialism, but they rebelled, with Group f.64 forming the basis of a renegade Modernist movement.

The Modernists eschewed Pictorialism and the Victorian-rooted schmaltz it had come to represent in favor of photography that exploited the medium's ability to communicate through its own esthetic properties. Their photographs, conceived as art, were rendered in the sharpest possible detail, foreground to background, a style that had been demeaned by the Pictorialists as coarse and utilitarian. Adams and his fellow iconoclasts, looking back, recognized their "innovation" in the 19th-century work of pioneer Western survey photographers and called it art.

One of the initial innovators and strongest advocates of technically pure, or "straight," art photography was Edward Weston, who shares the limelight with Adams in this show. (Death Valley, 1938; a series of Dunes, Oceano, 1936; and Surf at Orick, North Coast, 1938 are three exquisite examples of Weston's influential contributions to the Modernist movement.) Central to his conception of straight photography was the idea that a photographer should "visualize" his finished print in the camera -- that is, before he or she pushes the button -- and then produce that photograph through the technical manipulation of angle, composition, exposure, and development. Realizing this ideal, of course, requires extreme mastery of photographic technique. Here again, Ansel Adams emerged as one of the "new" photography's leading figures, with his formulation of Zone System photography.

Simplified, Adams's Zone approach divides the spectrum of tones available in a black-and-white photograph into 10 zones, with Zone Zero representing black and Zone Nine representing white. Between the extremes, the photographer applies his subjective judgment to apportion the rest, fixing Zone Five as the "middle," and Zone Six as the average tone of human flesh. Applying the Zone System requires an experienced mix of science and intuition -- interpreting the results of extensive light-meter readings into exposure and development techniques that will achieve the exact photographic print the photographer "visualized." And again, the decisions are made before the picture is taken. Random manipulation in the darkroom, a major aspect of Pictorial-school experimentation, is eliminated.

By requiring such control over the quality of his negatives, Weston had elevated the process of photography to the level of art itself. Adams applied science and expanded that idea to (literally) logical extremes. Both have been criticized for obsessing on technique at the possible expense of interpretation and imagination. But their purist pursuit of "exact" reproduction found its esthetic defense in their shared belief that nature itself speaks symbolically. A piece of nature, faithfully documented to represent not just the objects in front of the camera but the interplay of light and shadow and the tonal contrast of juxtaposed elements exactly as the camera experienced them, will convey nature's message, as subjectively interpreted by the photographer, to the viewer.

Counter-arguments contend that the camera itself is a powerful abstracting device; that photographing in black-and-white denies the natural attribute of color; and that deep-focus photography reproduces scenes differently from what the human eye sees. Weston and Adams's defenders accept these elements as the camera's unique virtues -- the very reasons it is the ideal tool for communicating nature's messages. And after all, Modernist nature photographers never claimed to reproduce the actual experience of being in nature but merely to translate that experience through art.

The arguments and hair-splitting discussions are endless. At what point does technique become an end in itself? If accuracy is the photographer's interpretive tool, how exactly does the photographer impose his subjective interpretation? Can a 19th-century Western landscape taken merely to document Yosemite Valley for the US Congress communicate the same sort of spiritual content as an Adams art photo taken 100 years later?

Those issues lurk, unanswered, inside "In Praise of Nature." And the show provides the opportunity to wrestle with them. But the power -- and the poetry -- of the photographs included here is unquestionable. Adams, who died in 1984, and his follow Western Modernists saw meaning and purpose in the 19th-century documentarian's vision of the West and, in the disillusioned years between World Wars, rediscovered it. In the end, the lofty arguments of art that will forever haunt this movement take a back seat to the emotional clout of the photographs.

Writing from the field to his future wife, in 1922, Adams explained, "Any news in the ordinary sense would be an insipid blur of thought -- I would much rather send you a little hint of mood -- something that echoes, though ever so slightly, the primal song of the wilderness . . . "

As if in testimony to Adams's vision, those echoes resonate through these photographs as through the land itself.

Sources for this essay included the exhibition catalogue In Praise of Nature: Ansel Adams and Photographers of the American West, Dayton Art Institute, 1999; and The History of Photography, by Beaumont Newhall, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1964.