Ansel Adams at 111

The Tetons and the Snake River by Ansel Adams. Image in the pub­lic domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ansel Adams, born on 20 Feb 1902, would have been 111 years old today. His approach to pho­to­graphy, requir­ing a pre­cise tech­nique, coupled with a sens­it­ive heart, and a per­cept­ive mind, is as fresh today as it was in his hey­day, in the early part of the 20^th cen­tury. Even a curs­ory search for his name on the web­sites pop­u­lar with the more involved pho­to­graph­ers, APUG, Large Format Photography Forum, or photo.net, yields 20,000 unique posts and com­ments about him, many of which are recent.

Why is Ansel Adams so rel­ev­ant today? In short: Adams con­tin­ues to inspire pho­to­graph­ers. He has been inspir­ing me for a long time, so let me share my per­spect­ive with you, as my small way of say­ing a thank you to this amaz­ing man.

I think there are three aspects to what makes Adams unique in the can­on of the most import­ant pho­to­graph­ers of all time: his artist­ic style, his pre­cise teach­ings, and a happy life. It is the inter­twined nature of those three that makes the man so spe­cial — and so inspirational.

Adams’s bold, yet sens­it­ive, some­what roman­ti­cised style in his pho­to­graph­ic art of land­scape, shown in a vis­ion of a per­fec­tion that may have not even exis­ted at the time he took his most fam­ous pic­tures, like Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, or The Tetons and the Snake River, is strik­ing for its pur­ity and bal­ance. He was not afraid to break new grounds, for example by visu­al­ising, and then print­ing, his skies dark, or even deep black — if you have only seen his prints in a book, or on a com­puter screen, you must try to see one at an exhib­i­tion. Nothing will pre­pare you for the visu­al and emo­tion­al impact of those skies when you see them in his real, sil­ver-gelat­in prints! Sometimes, he felt he had to erase the impur­ity of what he con­sidered to be human-made scars on nature, like the let­ters LP still barely show­ing in Winter Sunrise, taken from the town of Lone Pine in California, which I see as an expres­sion of his polit­ic­al lean­ing towards con­ser­va­tion­ism. No mat­ter what the sub­ject might have been, he prin­ted his pho­to­graphs to a level of express­ive and tech­nic­al per­fec­tion that tra­di­tion­al, wet-dark­room pho­to­graph­ers have always been striv­ing for. Even as a mas­ter, he is known for hav­ing enjoyed the pleas­ure of accom­plish­ment, when he had finally arrived at a print he was work­ing on, just like a child would. We all know that great feel­ing of sat­is­fac­tion one gets when we cre­ate some­thing that has reached the peak of our present abil­it­ies. However, his con­stant pur­suit of mas­tery is as an import­ant part of his style, as any more eas­ily defin­able char­ac­ter­ist­ic would be.

Learning through prac­tice, which he has always emphas­ised, is key to any craft, espe­cially such a manu­al one as tra­di­tion­al, film-based pho­to­graphy. However, one has to start some­where, and this is where the second aspect of what is so unique about Adams comes to mind: his teach­ings. Adams wrote a lot, but noth­ing in pho­to­graphy books quite com­pares to his tri­logy that sum­mar­ises all of his tech­nique — far, far more than just the Zone System, and all of it in the shortest pos­sible amount of space: The Camera, The Negative, and The Print. These are con­sist­ently the most often recom­men­ded three pieces of read­ing that any aspir­ing ana­logue pho­to­graph­er would hear about. It is not easy to think through everything that a per­son knows about a sub­ject, and it is even harder to put it in a small amount of space. It is much easi­er to write big­ger, thick­er books that are pop­u­lar nowadays, than to edit our thoughts down to just the bare essen­tials, all val­id­ated through own exper­i­ence, logic, and sci­ence. There is no pad­ding there, every page is as use­ful today, as it has been in the past, even if some product names may have changed. However, it was not just the books. Adams was con­stantly run­ning work­shops, in which he taught his tech­nique, through­out his life. When I was going through my pains of want­ing to improve the qual­ity of my pho­to­graphy in 1999, it was those three books of his that have helped me learn how to work with large format film, and how to strive for an express­ive print. Sometimes I wish I had lived in his days to have atten­ded one of his work­shops. I am very for­tu­nate, how­ever, that I still have a chance to learn from his best stu­dents, whom he chose to be his assist­ants: John Sexton, and Alan Ross.

As he points out in his won­der­fully hon­est, funny, and a mov­ing book, An Autobiography, he has not really been fin­an­cially suc­cess­ful until well into his 60s. Many may not know that he has nev­er earned the astro­nom­ic­al sums his prints com­manded — those prices were earned by art deal­ers and those who had the wis­dom to buy from him earli­er in his life. Even in his very last years, he would only charge $800 for his finest prints — his per­son­al record — know­ing they could imme­di­ately be resold for ten times, or more, than that amount. He was acutely aware of this — he once gif­ted print of his to a friend of mine remind­ing him: Don’t sell it now, keep it, it will help you buy a house one day. Nonetheless, he has man­aged to make ends meet, liv­ing without excess, but liv­ing in what his auto­bi­o­graphy oozes with: hap­pi­ness. Was there a secret to his life?

What makes Ansel Adams so inspir­ing in the 21^st cen­tury is pre­cisely that he was able to live a full life that many people would envy now: doing mostly what he loved, and earn­ing just enough to hap­pily get by — cer­tainly not liv­ing in poverty, but clearly without the grave entrap­ments of wealth. It must have taken a lot of wis­dom to pare down his needs and to focus on what was essen­tial, in itself a mark of char­ac­ter. Though I have nev­er met him, based on all that I read, saw, and heard about him, I real­ised that his life was focused on his artist­ic expres­sion, which had sparked the hap­pi­ness, and was fur­ther fuelled by the won­der­ful response he was get­ting when he was teach­ing oth­ers, at his work­shops and through his writ­ings. I see that Adams had cre­ated a won­der­ful bal­ance in his life, where each ele­ment was in uni­son with one anoth­er, help­ing him feel con­tent even in the toughest of times.

Perhaps that is a recipe for a happy life. It inter­twines oth­er­wise sep­ar­ate ele­ments: artist­ic cre­ativ­ity, per­sist­ently dis­cip­lined think­ing, and an oblig­a­tion to relent­lessly pass use­ful skills to oth­ers in the soci­ety. When I dream, I like to think of myself as still being able to teach oth­ers when I am in my 70s and bey­ond. I hope to be rel­ev­ant because of my skills, and because of my work — maybe less because of IT, which will change and which will be for­got­ten, but hope­fully more because of my pho­to­graphy, through which I wish to share a way of see­ing the world as a com­plex, abstract, yet a hap­pily con­tinu­ing place.

Happy Birthday, Ansel! Thank you for inspir­ing me.

Rafal