Patience, images load slowly
DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, Calif. May 2023
Ansel Adams photo exhibit.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco occupy the unceded land of the Ramaytush Ohlone, who are the original inhabitants of what is now the San Francisco Peninsula. The greater Bay Area is the ancestral territory of the Miwok, Yokuts, and Patwin, as well as other Ohlone peoples. Over thousands of generations, Indigenous nations and communities have lived here, and they continue to do so today. We recognize and honor Indigenous ancestors, descendants, elders, and communities.
We respect the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous peoples and their traditional territories. It is important to understand the history of the San Francisco Peninsula and the dynamics of settler colonialism in the region to create a broader awareness of their impact today. This exhibition includes historic photographs representing Pueblo communities including Acoma, Zuni, Tesuque, San Ildefonso, Taos, and Dine/Navajo, as well as the homelands of Yosemite Valley.
This exhibition also includes voices from Indigenous communities whose ancestors and lands are represented in these galleries. We thank the many interpretation partners who authored and contributed to labels, helping convey the consequences of historical photography of Indigenous homelands by non-Natives.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1960
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2681
Ansel Adams made this spectacular image of two of his favorite subjects-Half Dome and the moon-on an autumn afternoon in 1960. He witnessed a brilliant gibbous moon rising to the left of the vertical rock face and, using a long lens and orange filter, carefully framed what would become one of his most popular late works. "As soon as I saw the moon coming up by Half Dome,
I had visualized the image, Adams wrote.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Pueblo Indian Passing Oven at Tesuque,
New Mexico, 1929
Eagle Dance, Tesuque Pueblo,
New Mexico, 1929
Gelatin silver prints
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2371; 2018.23
In the summer of 1929, Ansel Adams told Mary Austin his collaborator on the Taos Pueblo book, that he made some "stunning" Pueblo dance negatives during visit to San Ildefonso and Tesuque. He considered creating . ;portfolio of ceremonial dance photographs, but it was ever realized. While Indigenous dances were often ,crowded with tourists by the 1920s, Adams cropped out all signs of casual bystanders in his images, as if to return these occasions to the sacred community .rituals they originally were
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake,
Alaska, 1948
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2739
Ansel Adams shot this image of Mount McKinley in Denali National Park at 1:30 in the morning, just two hours after the setting of the midsummer sun. He described, "As the sun rose, the clouds lifted, and the mountain glowed an incredible shade of pink. Laid out in front of Mount McKinley, Wonder Lake was pearlescent against the dark embracing arms of the shoreline. I made what I visualized as an inevitable image. The scale of this great mountain is hard to believe-the camera and I were thirty miles from McKinley's base:'
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The other side of the mountain
Ansel Adams made his reputation mainly through images of beautiful, seemingly unspoiled nature. Less well known are the images he produced in California's Death Valley and Owens Valley, southeast of Yosemite. He was drawn to these more forbidding landscapes multiple times-occasionally lured by a book or magazine project but often of his own volition.
Here, on the dry side of the Sierra Nevada, Adams and his work took a dramatic detour. The photographer Edward Weston introduced Adams to Death Valley, where he photographed sand dunes, salt flats, and sandstone canyons. Owens Valley was once farmland, but its residents struggled after their water supply was diverted to the growing city of Los Angeles in 1913. In 1943, Adams first traveled to nearby Manzanar, where he photographed Japanese Americans forcibly relocated to internment camps shortly after the US entered World War II. The resulting series explores the tension between the area's open spaces and the physical restrictions imposed upon internees.
Contemporary photographers continue to find compelling subjects in these remote places. Their images explore the raw beauty of the terrain and the sometimes unsettling ways it is used todayincluding as the site of maximum-security prisons and clandestine military projects carried out under wide skies.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Mount Williamson from Manzanar, Sierra Nevada, California, 1944
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2744
On a visit to Manzanar, a Japanese internment camp, in 1944, Ansel Adams drove to the field of boulders that extends to the base of Mount Williamson. "There was a glorious storm going on in the mountains:' he wrote. "I set up my camera on the rooftop platform of my car, [which] enabled me to get a good view over the boulders to the base of the range:' The resulting photograph captures a storm passing over the distant mountain range-an awe-inspiring image that confounds all sense of scale and perspective.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Birds on Wire, Evening, 1943, printed 1984 Entrance to Manzanar, 1943, printed 1984
Gelatin silver prints
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, purchased as the gift of Sidney R. Knafel (PA1948),
2015101; 2015.10.2
A few months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast (two-thirds of whom were American citizens) were quickly rounded up, separated from homes, possessions, and businesses, and quietly relocated to remote incarceration camps.
A total of 11,070 Japanese Americans were processed through Manzanar War Relocation Center in Inyo County, California. Ansel Adams was invited to photograph Manzanar by Ralph Merritt, a Sierra Club friend who had recently been appointed director of the isolated detention center. Although he was not allowed to photograph the center's barbed wire or guns, Adams did see himself as a kind of conscientious objector for his work documenting the site and the people forced to live there.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
People Leaving Buddhist Church, Winter, 1943, printed 1984
Gelatin silver print
Addison Gallery of American Art Phillips Academy Andover, Massachusetts,, purchased as the gift of Sidney R. Knafei (PA1948), 2015.10.43
Due to Owens Valleys high altitude and climate, it is very hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter Here Ansel Adams not only records the bleak chill, the hand-built fence, and the camps basic tarpaper structures, but also shows that interned Japanese Americans were able to practice their religion at the camp, which featured Christian, Buddhist, and Shinto churches.
Potato Field, North Farm, Manzanar, 1943, printed 1984
Gelatin silver print
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy Andover, Massachusetts, purchased as lire gift of Sidney R. Knafel (PA1948),
2015.10.38
Ansel Adams was personally moved by the treatment of Japanese Americans in World War II when an older Japanese man who worked for his family for many years was transferred to a detention center. When Adams first went to Manzanar in 1943, he was "profoundly affected" by photographing the camp and meeting its incarcerated inhabitants. He later presented his Manzanar images in an exhibition and book entitled Born Free and Equal. Manzanar means "apple orchard" in Spanish, but agriculture in the area had suffered since the diversion of water to Los Angeles began in 1913. Nonetheless, the internees were responsible for raising much of their own food in the fields near the camp.
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Ansel Adams
(American, 1902-1984)
Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Owens Valley, California, ca. 1939
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2438
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Sand Dunes, Sunrise, Death Valley National Monument, California, ca. 1948
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2686
Ansel Adams initially found the bright, desolate expanse of Death Valley incredibly challenging. Years later, he detailed the making of this image, which he included in his book on Furnace Creek, on view nearby: "After sleeping on the camera platform atop my car, I woke before dawn, made some coffee and stoked my stomach with beans reheated from last night's supper. I then perched my camera and tripod across my shoulders and plodded heavily through the shifting sand dunes, attempting to find just the right light upon just the right dune... Just then, almost magically, I saw an image become substance: the light of sunrise traced a perfect line down a dune that alternately glowed with the light and receded in shadow."
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Ansel Adams
(American, 1902-1,984)
From Zabriskie Point Death Valley National Monument California, 1941
Gelatin saver print
Museum of Fine Aft Boston, The Lane Coliection, 2018_2515
This image was taken during Ansel Adams' rust visit to Death Valley while working on the national parks mural project for the US Department of the Interior. Here his fascination with the disorienting loss of scale and Pie that the desert offered is clear. He cautioned other photographers to 'never go blithely off photographing over the hill without first getting your bearings by the sun and the huge salient landmarks; a car can become a surprisingly small object to find in Death Valley."
Manly Beacon, Death Valley National Monument, California, ca. 1948 Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arcs, Boston, The Law Co/lection, 2018.2571
In 1953 Arizona Highways published a feature on Death Valley illustrated with photographs by Ansel Adams (the magazine is on view nearby). Edward Weston took photographs there in the late 1930s and encouraged Adams to do the same. The latter spoke of the rewards of working in that challenging environment in a letter to another friend, the photographer Minor White: "alley is SOMETHING' it's just a tremendous nest of photographic opportunity. Interesting to recognize many of Edward's pets, and also interesting to figure how I would do them my way."
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Stephen Tourlentes (American, b. 1959)
Rawlins, Wyoming,
State Death House Prison, 2000
Florence, Colorado,
Super Max Federal Prison, 2009
Inkjet prints
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum purchase with funds donated by Elisa and Haluk Soykan, 2011, 2011.1987, 2011.1988
Stephen Tourlentes often finds himself working in the vast expanses of the American West as he documents the nation's overcrowded prisons and program of mass incarceration and capital punishment. He photographs remote death-row institutions after dark to reveal their continuous intrusion on the night sky, like the glow of far-off cities.
"We are living in the era of mass incarceration in the US," says Tourlentes. "I discovered this by chance when a new prison was built in the town I grew up in Illinois. On the outskirts of town, the night sky was punctuated with a brilliant glow that changed my perception of the horizon. This transformation of the landscape revealed an unseen human cargo held in time and place.... Never going dark, these institutions permeate beyond their physical boundaries. This encroachment symbolizes a powerful tension that implicates the very nature of social priorities."
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Silverton, Colorado, ca. 1940
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2565
Set high in the San Juan Mountains, Silverton was a thriving center of gold and silver mining in the late nineteenth century. Ansel Adams' large-format camera view of Silverton takes in the entire expanse of distant peaks, as well as the former frontier mining town nestled in the valley below.
Ghost Town, Bodie, California, 1940
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Mrs. George R. Rowland, Sr., 1979,1979180
Bodie, California, was another popular destination for Ansel Adams, who was drawn to record the beautifully preserved structures-almost like a stage set that remained in what was once a booming nineteenth-century mining town with a population of about ten thousand.
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Laura McPhee (American, b. 1958)
Midsummer (Lupine and Fireweed), 2008 Early Spring (Peeling Bark in Rain), 2008
Inkjet prints
Courtesy of the artist
Working with a large-format camera, Laura McPhee records the impact of human activity on the land, especially in Idaho, a state she loves and visits regularly. These photographs from her Guardians of Solitude series were made in the aftermath of a massive forest fire. Caused by human error, it devastated thousands of acres of woodland before it was finally extinguished. McPhee returned to the area three years later to find that it had burst into bloom. In the renewal of the charred landscape, she found a powerful metaphor for human resilience in the face of terrible personal loss.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Grass and Burned Stump, Sierra Nevada California, 1935
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts. Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018
Ansel Adams made this photograph near Ash Camp, south of Yosemite National Park in an area where wrest fires raged some years earlier In his dose-up view, he juxtaposes the tender shoots of new grass and the charred surface of a burned stump.. This is an example of what Adams hiked to call the "microscopic" revelation of the lens.- which he saw as the ideal of his "straight," sharp-focus approach to pictograph.
Burned Trees, Owens Valley, California, ca. 1936
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Lane Collection
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Redwoods, Bull Creek Flat, Northern California, 1960
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Susan W. and Stephen D. Paine, 1975, 1975.721
Named for William Tecumseh Sherman, the American Civil War general for the Union army, this giant sequoia documented by Ansel Adams in the late 1930s is thought to be the largest tree on Earth. At 275 feet in height and more than two thousand years old, the tree is a challenge even for an expert photographer. Adams captures part of its massive trunk and canopy in this vertiginous view.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Rails and Jet Trails, Roseville, California,
ca. 1953
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2586
Housing Development, San Bruno Mountain, San Francisco, ca. 1966
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2639
In the 1950s and 1960s, Ansel Adams often recorded urban subjects like this view looking toward San Bruno Mountain, just south of San Francisco. Here Adams documents one of the many tract housing developments built during this period, as it snakes across the steep hillsides surrounding the rapidly growing city.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Salt Flats near Wendover, Utah, ca. 1941, Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2519
Ansel Adams made this remarkably abstract image of ancient salt beds during the first year of his national parks project Barely visible in the distance is a delicate string of telephone poles and wires, a slightly jarring intervention into an otherwise empty space. Adams' inclusion of the poles might be explained in part by the fact that Wendover was the meeting point for the first telephone line between New York and San Francisco. This achievement was celebrated at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition-a fair that the young Adams attended nearly every day, after his father gave him a season pass with instructions to visit daily, in place of formal schooling.
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Victoria Sambunaris (American, b. 1964)
Untitled (houses), Wendover, Utah, 2007
Chromogenic print
Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery,
Mill Valley, California
Victoria Sambunaris regularly takes her 5-by-7-inch field camera on road trips throughout the western United States, inspired by what she describes as "an unrelenting curiosity to understand the American landscape and our place in it." She returns to locations where she has worked previously to see how human intervention has transformed these places.
Here, Sambunaris depicts Wendover, Utah, in one of her characteristic bird's-eye views. The town was established as a stop on the Western Pacific Railroad, whose tracks are still visible in the distance. The foreground features new development and encroaching suburban sprawl reaching almost to the edge of the region's famous salt flats. "My motivation to traverse the American landscape is the attempt to reveal the layers of a place," Sambunaris says. "I resist approaching a landscape strictly as an expanse of scenery but view it as an anomaly with an abundance of information to be discovered."
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Victoria Sambunaris (American. b 1964)
Untitled (Farm with Workers)
Jacumba, ca 2010
Chromagenic print
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Lucas Foglia (American, b. 1983)
Beach Restoration after El Nino Waves, 2016
Inkjet print
Courtesy of the artist and Fredericks & Freiser, New York
Hurricane Sandy was a turning point for Lucas Foglia, who witnessed its disastrous impact on his family's
Long Island farm in 2012. Convinced that human behavior and the changing weather patterns that produce such destructive storms are connected, he decided to document the many ways in which human beings use science and technology to respond to climate change.
Now living in California, Foglia photographed workers and machines performing the extremely demanding and futile task of shoring up the Pacific coastline in the face of El Nino wind and waves. His sharply angled viewpoint from the highway above consciously echoes the abstract composition of Ansel Adams' Surf Sequence of 1940.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Wall Writing, Hornitos, California, ca. 1960
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2716
Freeway Interchange, Los Angeles, 1967
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2713
Ansel Adams made this aerial view of the famously tangled freeways of Los Angeles while photographing for Fiat Lux (1967), a publication commissioned by the University of California to celebrate its centennial. Intended to serve as a visual document of the entire University of California system, the project saw Adams travel to the nine UC campuses, along with the system's various research stations, observatories, natural reserves, and agricultural extensions. The most extensive of all his commercial projects, Fiat Lux took
Adams three years to complete and resulted in several thousand negatives.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Spiritual America, Horns and Belfry, Foothills, Sierra Nevada, California, ca. 1966
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2638
This work is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Spiritual America, a 1923 photograph by Ansel Adams' late friend and mentor Alfred Stieglitz depicting the hindquarters of a harnessed gelded horse. Like Stieglitz, Adams was concerned with what he felt was America's lack of spirituality and sense of communion with the natural world. He seems to suggest that houses of worship should require bullhorns to amplify their message, rather than simple bells ringing in their belfries.
Crosses, Mono Lake Cemetery, California, ca 1960 Gelatin saver print
Museum of Fine Arts. Boston,
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Cemetery Statue and Oil Derricks, Long Beach, California, 19391940
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2572
Sunnyside Cemetery sits atop Signal Hill in Long Beach, California, which has been dotted with pump jack rigs and derricks since the discovery of oil there in 1921. Ansel Adams later expressed surprise when this image was interpreted as a comment on the negative impact of oil drilling on the environment. He was on assignment for Fortune magazine when he took the photograph for a story published in 1941 on the city's booming aviation industry. Here the marble sculpture of a mournful woman, seated with a floral wreath in her lap, is set off against a backdrop of oil derricks that stand like a sea of dark cathedral spires on the perimeter of the cemetery.
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Mitch Epstein (American, b. 1952)
Signal Hill, Long Beach, California, from the series American Power, 2007
Chromogenic print
Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, Mill Valley, California
"[The] American Power [series] is an active response to the American dream gone haywire. My project focuses on the United States not only because I am American, but because the US has exported its model of unrestricted growth around the world in the form of mass consumerism, corporatism, and sprawl.
"We need to now export a revised model of growth, a revised American dream. I included pictures in American Power of renewable energy-wind, biotech, solar-to show that a healthier, more economical, and compassionate way of life is possible. American Power bears witness to the cost of growth; it asks viewers to consider the landscape they have created-and take responsibility for it." -Mitch Epstein
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Mitch Epstein (American, b. 1952)
Altamont Pass Wind Farm, California, from the series American Power, 2007
Chromogenic print
Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, Mill Valley, California
Mitch Epstein's American Power series investigates energy in its many forms by exploring how we create and consume it, as well as its impact on our daily lives. Often employing a bird's-eye view and printed on a very large scale, Epstein's photographs-like these showing oil drilling, wind turbines, desert irrigation, and suburban sprawl-call into question the very definition of power and point to our shared accountability for the abuse of our natural resources. In a world in which we are constantly inundated with photographs, these densely detailed views are also meant to slow down our "reading" of the images and remind us that each may be interpreted in a variety of ways.
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THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE
In his own time, Ansel Adams was aware of the environmental concerns facing California and the nation. Although Adams continued to make symphonic and pristine wilderness landscapes, as his career progressed, he began to create images that showed a more nuanced vision-images that decidedly break with widely held ideas about his work. He photographed urban sprawl, freeways, graffiti, oil drilling, ghost towns, rural cemeteries, mining towns, and the sometimes-dispossessed inhabitants of those places, as well as less romantic views of nature, such as the aftermath of forest fires.
Appreciated for their imagery and formal qualities, Adams' photographs also carry a message of advocacy. Photographers working in the American West today confront a changed, and changing, landscape. Human activity-urbanization, logging, mining, ranching, irrigated farming-and global warming continue to alter the terrain. Works by contemporary artists bear witness to these changes and their impacts, countering notions that our natural resources are limitless. Placed in conversation with Adams' photographs, these images aid our understanding of his singular contribution to the ways we envision the landscape and the urgency with which we must protect it.
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(American, 1902-1984)
Lone Pine Peak, Sierra Nevada, California,
1948
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2740
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Sand Fence, near Keeler, California, ca. 1948
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2569
Once the home of silver, zinc, and lead mines, Keeler, California, sits on the eastern shore of what was once Owens Lake. This substantial body of water went dry when most of the water in the Owens River was diverted to Los Angeles beginning in the early twentieth century. The lakebed is a major source of dust pollution; sand fences like this one are an attempt to contain the alkaline soil. Keeler's bleak existence seems perfectly expressed by the sinuous curves of the wooden fence and the seemingly impossible task of holding the soil in place-representing the dueling forces of people and nature in a beleaguered landscape.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Ferns, Near Kilauea Crater, Hawaii National Park, Hawaii, ca. 1948
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2738
Ansel Adams
faced numerous challenges when photographing the dramatic volcanic landscapes of
the national parks of Hawaii on Maui and the Big Island. Many of his pictures
focus on the exotic plant life-primordial looking ferns and the roots of banyan
trees-rather
than more sweeping views. Of his experience there, he wrote: "I still yearn for
pine needles, hard granite, clear water, and DRY air!"
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Abelardo MoreII
(American, b. Cuba, 1948)
Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Mount Moran and the Snake River from Oxbow Bend, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 2011
Inkjet print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the artist in memory of Robert Andrew McElaney, 2021, 2021.1007
Like several of the contemporary artists in this gallery, Abelardo Morell is a foreign-born photographer for whom US national parks hold special meaning. While growing up in Cuba, he fell in love with the popular Hollywood Westerns playing at the local cinema. Once he immigrated to the United States, he was eager to discover the region for himself. Here he takes in the sweeping grandeur of snowcapped Mount Moran and the Snake River from a vantage point similar to the one employed Ansel Adams seventy years earlier for his photograph of Grand Tetons National Park (on view nearby).
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, 1941
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2554
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Jay Haynes (American, 18531921)
Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and Falls,
ca. 1887
Albumen print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Sophie M. Friedman Fund, 1990,1990.465
Frank Jay Haynes was one of the second generation of photographers to be employed by the railroads and government surveys in the American West in the late nineteenth century. In 1884, he was named official photographer and concessionaire of Yellowstone to serve the growing numbers of tourists coming to visit the first national park. Yellowstone is situated on top of a massive subterranean volcano, which produces its active hot springs and towering geysers, such as Old Faithful. For his photograph of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Haynes used a mammoth-plate camera to produce a large glass negative, from which he made this highly detailed contact print.
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Ansel Adams American, 1902-1984)
Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 1942
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2513
Ansel Adams began writing how to books on photography in the mid 1930s, but he is best known for his series of technical books, including Camera and Lens, The Negative, The Print, and Natural Light Photography. In one of his later books, he uses an image of a Yellowstone geyser as an example of a particularly challenging subject that defies light-meter readings and tests a photographer's ability to "visualize" in advance something so inherently fleeting and unpredictable. "It is difficult to conceive of a substance more impressively brilliant than the spurting plumes of white waters in sunlight against a deep blue sky" he wrote.
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Ansel Adams (American, 19021984)
Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 1942
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2514
Ansel Adams' striking images of Old Faithful were the last national park pictures he made before the country entry into World War II caused the US Department of the Interior to discontinue funding for the project.
Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 1942
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
The Lane Collection, 2018.2516
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Pine Forest in Snow, Yosemite National
Park, ca. 1932
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2416
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Arno Rafael Minkkinen (American, b. Finland, 1945)
Homage to Watkins, Yosemite, 2007
Inkjet print
Museurn of Fine Arts, Boston, Sophie M. Friedman Fund
Several of the contemporary photographers in this exhibition call into question the archetypal images of empty wilderness spaces that have long hold a central place in the popular imagination. Arno Rafael Minkkinen activates pristine, unpopulated landscapes by introducing his own naked body into thorn, without relying on digital manipulation. Hero, the artist's seemingly headless torso and the gentle curve of his outstretched arms perfectly echo the bowl-shaped Yosemite Valley as seen from Inspiration Point.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Indian Mortar Holes, Big Meadow, Yosemite National Park, ca. 1940
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston„ The Lane collection, 2018.9454
The Ahwahnechee (Miwok) of Yosemite prepared food and sharpened tools using semispherical holes ground into bedrock as mortars and smooth stones as grinding tools (or pestles). Acorns of the black oak trees were a diet staple once abundant in the region. Settler colonialism, logging in the nineteenth century, and modern-day fire suppression have led to the growth of mainly conifers in their place.
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Carleton E. Watkins (American, 18291916)
Mount Starr King and Glacier Point, Yosemite, No. 69,1865-1866
Albumen print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund, 2006, 2006.847
Carleton E. Watkins took this photograph from the floor of Yosemite Valley while working for the California State Geological Survey in the mid 1860s. It is a more intimate and less sweeping view than the photograph Watkins self-described as the "best general view of Yosemite" (below), which presents the most recognizable features of the landscape.
Mount Starr King, the distant peak at center, was named for Thomas Starr King, the Unitarian minister from Boston whose life and ministry were powerfully influenced by his experiences in the Yosemite wilderness. Ansel Adams later shared his "disregard for the naming of things and [his skepticism] of those nonprofessionals who go through the wilderness classifying and labeling everything in sight."
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, 1942, printed ca. 1967
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2746
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, 1941
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2562
When a Sierra Club friend gave him a copy of the Wheeler geographical survey album (1871-1874), Ansel Adams had the opportunity to study Timothy H. O'Sullivan's photographic technique, as well as his subject matter. In 1941, as Adams set out to work in Canyon de Chelly as part of his national parks project, he decided to try to rephotograph O'Sullivan's view of an Ancestral Pueblo site. Adams used a green filter to replicate the dramatic striations in the canyon walls that are so pronounced in the early print, as otherwise they would not appear in a "straight" print from his modern negative. Of the power of works like this one, Adams said, "O'Sullivan had that extra dimension of feeling. You sense it, you see it."
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Thunderstorm, Ghost Ranch, Chama River Valley, Northern New Mexico, 1937, printed ca. 1948
The Enchanted Mesa, near Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, 1937
Gelatin silver prints
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2471; 2018.2459
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Ansel Adams was fascinated by the thunderstorms that passed over the flat-topped
mesas near Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. He made forty exposures of storm clouds in a
single day. He wrote about his time in New Mexico to gallery owner Alfred
Stieglitz in New York: "It is all very beautiful and magical here-a quality
which cannot be described. You have to live and breathe it, let the sun bake it
into you. The skies and land are so enormous, the detail so precise and
exquisite that wherever you are, you are isolated in a glowing world between the
macro and micro where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and clocks
stopped long ago:'
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, 1937, printed ca. 1955
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2472
White Cross and Church, Coyote, New Mexico, 1937
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2463
In 1937 Ansel Adams spent several weeks traveling in the Southwestern states with painter Georgia O'Keeffe and friends. Adams and O'Keeffe shared an interest in the region's expansive skies and distinctive mesas, as well as the mix of Indigenous and Spanish cultures. The group first spent two weeks at Ghost Ranch, O'Keeffe's home in the Chama River Valley of New Mexico. Adams made this picture in a nearby town, perhaps drawn by the way the foreground cross echoes a smaller one on the church steeple. Their road trip took them through Pueblo and Navajo lands in New Mexico and Hopi lands in Arizona; Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona; and Mesa Verde in Colorado.
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John K. Hillers
(American b. Germany, 1843-Hillers)
Zuni Indian, ca. 1880
Albumen print TM Lane Collection
Between 1870 and 1881, HIllers extensively documented the pueblo at Zuni, photographing not only Its people and distinctive multistoried adobe architecture, but also Its relationship to the surrounding land. He made panoramic views of the pueblo and recorded cultural observances including ceremonial dance and individual artisans at work. He also captured details of daily life, such as the domed outdoor ovens (homos) in which the
Pueblo people cooked food. Ansel Adams' photograph featuring an outdoor oven at Tesuque, New Mexico, hangs nearby.
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In the American Southwest
Ansel Adams first visited the American Southwest in 1927. While there he collaborated with author Mary Austin on an illustrated book about Taos Pueblo that aimed to communicate the threat that tourism in the region posed to the artistic and religious traditions of Indigenous people. Adams made images for the book only after receiving permission from the Taos Pueblo council, to whom he paid a fee and gifted a copy of the finished publication. He also photographed some Indian cultural observances that had become popular attractions among tourists. Adams' own images of Native dancers have a complex legacy: although he was one of the non-Native onlookers, he carefully framed his views to leave out evidence of the gathered crowds.
In Dine photographer Will Wilson's ongoing series Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, the artist responds to and confronts historical depictions of Native Americans by white artists. He focuses in particular on those who traveled west in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to document the Indigenous people they viewed as a "vanishing race" due to US government-sanctioned genocide and settler colonialism.
Left to right:
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Richard Misrach
(American, b. 1949)
Golden Gate Bridge, 12.19.99, 7:31 am,
1999, printed 2020
Golden Gate Bridge, 10.31.98, 5:18 pm, 1998, printed 2016
Golden Gate Bridge, 2.13.01, 5:32 pm,
2001, printed 2017
Golden Gate Bridge, 11.10.00, 12:50-3:40 am,
2000, printed 2016
Pigment prints
Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
In 1997, Richard Misrach began what would become a three-year project photographing the Golden Gate Bridge from his porch in the Berkeley Hills. Placing his large-format 8-by-10-inch camera in the same position on each occasion, Misrach recorded hundreds of views of the distant span, at various times of day and in every season, set off against the constantly changing sky. The series was reissued in 2012 to mark the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bridge's landmark opening.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Marin Hills from Lincoln Park, San Francisco, 1952
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2703
Ansel Adams' childhood home, located in present-day Sea Cliff, offered impressive views of the Mann Headlands and the Golden Gate. "My bedroom was on the second floor; it was about twelve feet square and situated in the northwest corner. I could see the Golden Gate from the north window and the cypress trees and rolling dunes around the old Chinese cemetery in what is now Lincoln Park to the west. I could also gaze well out to sea, beyond Point Bonita and the white glimmer of the Cabbage Patch, a dangerous shoal. I could watch ships of every description enter and leave the embrace of the Golden Gate.°
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Becoming a Modernist
San Francisco is where Ansel Adams became a modernist photographer.
He grew up in present-day Sea Cliff, where his family home overlooked the Presidio to the Marin Headlands beyond. These views made a lasting impact on his photographs-he later described constantly returning to the elements of nature that surrounded him in his childhood.
Adams' first exhibition, featuring photographs he took on Sierra Club hikes, was held at the club's headquarters on Montgomery Street in 1928. Convinced that he could make a living as a photographer, he acquired a large-format camera and became an advocate of "straight" (unmanipulated) photography, leaving behind the soft-focus aesthetic of his earlier work. He experimented with abstraction and extreme close-ups, capturing texture and clarity of detail. He recorded cloud filled skies and depicted landscapes as seemingly infinite spaces devoid of people.
During the Great Depression, Adams began photographing a wider range of subjects, including the challenging reality of urban life in San Francisco and the region's changing landscape. The latter included the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge (1933-1937), which radically transformed the views of San Francisco Bay that had captivated Adams in his youth.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Laurel Hill Cemetery, San Francisco, ca. 1936
Gelatin sever print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018_2412
Anal Adams photographed cemeteries throught his career but among his favorites was Laurel Hill, with its palpable atmosphere of abandc w * and iom rd by California Street Geary Boulevard and Parker and
Presidia Avenues, the cemetery was was in present-day Laurel Heights. Before its demolition in the later 1930s, when the buried were moved to Coilma, Adams made a ou ber of beautify elegiac pho~tograprs there. including this pair of fallen headstones in which rainwater had collected.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Sutro Gardens, San Francisco, 1933
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2411
High on a hill overlooking the Pacific, Sutro Heights was a pleasure garden created in the late nineteenth century by Adolph Sutro, a silver magnate and the mayor of San Francisco from 1895 until 1897. Although they had fallen into disrepair by the 1930s, its foggy grounds and crumbling copies of classical sculpture were favorite subjects for Ansel Adams, who described the park as "quite a mournful place:'
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Ansel Admaks making an exposition to get to views of the beautiful landscapes.
Monolith
The Face of Half Dome
April 10, 1927
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Mark Klett (American, b. 1952) and Byron Wolfe (American, b. 1967)
Panorama showing Carleton Watkins's camera position for Yosemite Falls and Merced River, 2003
Archival pigment print
Courtesy of Etherton Gallery, Tucson, Arizona
Ansel Adams stated that it was the appeal of the "great earth gesture" in the Sierra Nevada that always drew him back over the course of his career. Yosemite, with its spectacular granite peaks, lakes, rivers, and waterfalls, was a visual and emotional touchstone for the artist
His photographs, as well as those of nineteenth-century predecessors such as Carleton E Watkins, inspired the public to visit in ever-growing numbers, something that Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe represent in this panorama of a warm sunny day in the national park. Their view of Yosemite is full of visitors paddling down the Merced River or seated along its banks-the wilderness has become a national playground.
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Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
The Yosemite Falls, Ca. 1861, printed 1880-1890
Isaiah West Tabor
(American, 18301912), printer
Albumen print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, A. Shuman CollectionAbraham Shuman Fund, 1982,1982A18
Carleton E. Watkins was born in Oneonta, New York, and made his way west in the 1850s in the wake of the California gold rush. Although he had only briefly apprenticed in a photographic portrait studio, Watkins began making landscapes in Yosemite in 1861, taking with him a mule train, a cumbersome dark tent, and equipment to make wet-plate collodion photographs in the field. Watkins's view looks north/northwest across the valley floor, accentuating the distance between the two levels of Yosemite Falls and artfully framing each with dark tree limbs and foliage. In 2003, photographers
Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe chose Watkins's viewpoint for their panorama, which hangs nearby.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Monolith-The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927,
printed 1950-1960
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, 2018.2741
This majestic view of Half Dome is one of Ansel Adams' most important and groundbreaking early photographs. Shot on a hike in the spring of 1927, it represents his first conscious "visualization"-an image fully anticipated before he tripped the shutter, and one that for Adams captured the emotional impact of the scene. He made this enlarged print years later, but the dramatic sky and the sharp contrast between the brilliant white snow and dark ridges in the granite were recorded in 1927 when Adams took the photograph, using a deep red filter and a long exposure (made possible by the windless conditions that day).
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Ansel Adams In our time
For many viewers, Ansel Adams' photographs of the western United States have become visual embodiments of the sites he captured.
Combining technical mastery with a modernist sensibility, Adams' works center his deep connection to the natural environment. This connection continues to resonate in new ways today, as the land scape around us experiences the ongoing effects of climate change. This is an exhibition about legacy. In these galleries, more than one hundred of Adams' works have been placed in a new, dual conversation that includes both the nineteenth-century photographers who preceded him in the American West and the contemporary photographers reframing some of the same places and environmental issues. This context invites viewers to reevaluate Adams' influence on Western concepts of landscape and the urgency with which it must be protected.
Born in San Francisco, Adams (1902-1984) first picked up a camera in California's Yosemite National Park at age fourteen. He returned to the park virtually every year, and perhaps no other place had a more lasting influence on the photographer. In Yosemite, he both honed his skills and came to recognize photography's ability to depict the natural world as a source of spiritual renewal.
Anse! Adams The Tetons and Snake River Grand Teton National Park, 1942. Photograph, geIa1in silver print. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © The Amse[ Adams Publishing Rights Trust
