The first step on an Ansel Adams-inspired trip to Yosemite is to visit the gallery run by his family. It is in the park’s central area called Yosemite Valley, and displays and sells Adams’ work as well as photos taken by several contemporary artists. Before Adams died in 1984, he spent years living in a house behind the gallery and leading workshops there. Now others teach the workshops, and the gallery is managed by Adams’s grandchildren. The gallery’s staff leads free camera walks three days a week. The gallery also shows a free film about Adams once a week, rents out cameras and tripods and sells keepsakes and guidebooks.
I ordered three books written by Adams from the gallery’s Web site before my trip: Adams’s autobiography, his collected photos of Yosemite and a step-by-step explanation of some of his works called “Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs.” By the time our plane landed in Fresno, Calif., I felt well-equipped to step inside Ansel land.
But Yosemite does not often appear as it did at the moments Adams tripped his shutter. Nor is it easy to stand where he stood and capture the same images.
“I’ve had people say they are kind of disappointed,” says Glenn Crosby, the curator of the Ansel Adams Gallery. “They only know the park through Ansel’s eyes, and he was only showing you the keepers. The park is not always as dramatic as his work.”
I have to wonder: who the hell are these disappointed people?
Yeah, Adams was one of the greatest photographers to ever snap a shutter and his images certainly rise to the definition of fine art. But if you can stand in Yosemite Valley or at Tunnel View (to say nothing of hiking into the High Country) and experience disappointment, how can you possibly imagine yourself perceptive enough to appreciate the tiny fragments of it Adams captured in his pictures?
Cameras were invented to preserve the memory of visiting places like Yosemite, but no picture can convey the experience of being there.
OK, rant over. Actually, the article offers a nice overview of the relationship of Adams and Yosemite and is worth a read if you’re thinking of visiting.
Great photographs, like great poetry, don’t capture an experience. They
evoke it. They stimulate one in such a way that you are somehow transported
to the scene. I’ve seen many pictures that have taken me to another time
and place, given me a sense of what it was like to be there. Often that sense
is fragile, fleeting, but it’s undeniably there.
What I don’t understand is people trying to recreate Ansel’s work. Apart from
literally finding and standing in his footsteps, there are an infinity of
different light conditions. It’s unlikely they’d be repeated. Do these people
spend time in their home workshops, trying hundreds of materials for filaments,
in an effort to reproduce Edison’s invention of the light bulb?
Oh yeah, people try to do the same thing with Galen Rowell’s work too.
Don’t understand it… do they try and write Shakespear’s plays again,
or re-compose Beethovan symphonies?
And that guy tried to remake “Psycho” scene by scene. Response was quizzical, to say the least.
I think people are tempted with photography because it is so much more accessible than, say, learning the violin. But what you learn is that you need virtuoso technique and a huge body of knowledge acquired over years of study to get any good at it.
One thing in digital photography’s favor: it lets you learn fast, and cheap.
I’d guess that this happens more with Ansel Adams than with most photographers. Many of his great photos are also pretty pictures of mountains, and the easiest way to understand them is as really good postcards. That may be a surface understanding, but I can’t argue that they are not pretty pictures of mountains.
A while ago (1980-81?), the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston hosted an Adams exhibit that helped lead people to look a bit deeper into the photos. My favorite wall was five photos of the valley from the same place, all different weather and light. It seemed he was so familiar with the valley that he saw the light more than he saw the rock.
I immediately thought of Monet’s multiple paintings of the Rouen Cathedral in different light.