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Ansel Adams: On View this Summer

By Peggy Roalf   Friday August 28, 2015

Wilderness, or wildness, is a mystique. A religion, an intense philosophy, a dream of ideal society—these are also mystiques. As the fisherman depends upon the river, lakes and seas, and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind … depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence. Ansel Adams, from a speech to The Wilderness Society, May 9, 1980 

Spanning seven decades of his groundbreaking career, a retrospective of more than 50 photographs by Ansel Adams will be on view through September 8, 2015, at the Quintenz Gallery in Aspen, Colorado. 

Ansel Adams: Masterworks from Seven Decades, 1928–1982 comprises the entirety of one of the most significant, privately held Adams collections. Most of the work has not been exhibited in many years. The exhibition is presented in association with Michael Shapiro Photographs, Westport, CT.

The exhibition features an important print of one of Adams’s most famous images, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941. This print was made in the early 1960s when photographic paper companies used more silver in their paper. By comparison, prints of the work made in the 1970s have a different tone as the costly silver content was gradually removed from the paper. Adams also noted the changes in printing by various negatives: “The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.”

Moonrise, Hernandez is presently the most lucrative fine art photograph ever made, sold and resold at auction, printed on wall calendars and posters by the millions. In 1996, Adams biographer Mary Alinder estimated that Adams had made 1,300 prints of Moonrise, Hernandez had over 40 years. One year at AIPAD The Photogaphy Show, I counted more than 20; a couple of years ago there were eight or so. In recent photo auctions in New York, the numbers at Sotheby’s and at Christie's have been declining. Photo above, courtesy Sotheby's, from the Fall 2013 Photographs auction.

But why did Adams make so many prints of a single image? In essence, the master of black-and-white photography, who wrote the book on exposure and processing large-format film, had created a negative that wasn’t up to his technical standards. It was on the thin side, and every print had to be meticulously burned and dodged to get a balance of light and dark with pleasing contrast.

The early prints of Moonrise, Hernandez showed what Adams actually saw that late afternoon in 1941, with the moon becoming visible in the sky while the sun was just sinking below the horizon; the moon was dim; the sky was gray and open. After it was published in a photo magazine in 1942, Adams began receiving orders for prints. But he was never happy with the negative and over time, he experimented with new, higher contrast enlarging papers, in larger and larger sizes. Through repeated printings, Adams brought out the mystical vision that he saw in his mind's eye years before.

His early prints were around 13 x 17 inches; by the 1950s he was making mural size prints [his term] that measure close to 40 x 60 inches. A mural size print from the Polaroid Collection sold at Sotheby’s for $518,500 in 2010 while a vintage print from 1948, at 14 x 19 inches, set the standing record in 2006, selling for $609,600 at Sotheby’s.

The next time you attend a major photo fair or auction, and notice more than a few prints of this iconic image, look closely at the print quality, the size, and the date as well as taking in the mystery of this magnificent image. For now there are a number of exhibitions of Adams's work from coast to coast, throughout the summer:

Ansel Adams: Masterworks from Seven Decades, 1928–1982 continues at the Qunitenz Gallery, Aspen Colorado, through September 8. Other exhibitions of Adams’s work on view this summer:
Ansel Adams: Early Works, through August at The Long Island Museum of American Art, Stony Brook, NY.
Ansel Adams: Masterworks, through August 30 at Foothills Art Center, Golden, CO.

Ansel Adams: Enduring & Eloquent, at the Ansel Adams Gallery, Yosemite
Ansel Adams, August 7, 2015-January 17 2016, at Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX.

Adams, Curtiss & Weston: Photographers of the American West, through November 29, at Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, CA. 
Information about these exhibitions, and more, at the Ansel Adams Gallery.

 


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