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Story by Jack Foley |
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THE work of Ansel Adams, the photographer whose images of the peaks
and canyons of Yosemite Valley and the stark desert of Arizona serve as a
defining image of the American West, is now on view at London's Hayward
Gallery until September 22.
Adams is generally considered to be one of the great 20th-century photographers
and Ansel Adams at 100 is a timely celebration of the centenary of
the artist's birth in 1902, bringing together 114 of his finest works, made
over 50 years, some of them little known.
Although Adams has been exhibited widely around the world, this major exhibition is the first serious attempt since his death in 1984 to re-evaluate his work and his achievement as an artist. It has been specially selected by the renowned curator and writer on photography, John Szarkowski.
According to the Hayward Gallery's website, 'Ansel Adams’s reputation,
considerable since the 1940s, has continued to grow since his death'.
"His iconic landscape photographs of mountains, lakes, geysers, moonrises
and storm clouds are known across the world through a phenomenal output of
books and reproductions as well as exhibitions.
"Ansel Adams at 100 presents many of the artist’s best-known works
– grand vistas such as Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico and El Capitan
– alongside less familiar works, many on an intimate scale: close-ups
of dried stumps and knotholes, images of leaves and grasses floating on pools
of water.
"They reveal Adams’s fascination with abstraction, the mysteries
of light and the miraculous beauty of the natural, unspoilt landscape. On
a trip in 1923 he recalled: ‘the silver light turned every blade of grass
and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendour.’
Adams is particularly revered for his perfectionist technique. Throughout his life he reprinted and reinterpreted his earlier negatives &