I froze seeing this image, Carolin’s mother next to me in the first week of Rumpsringa! An immediate memory of standing in the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley with my own mother.
And that moment back then, in the gallery, with Mum, had wooshed me back to a moment stopping in the trees with Pete and Keara on an overnight backcountry ski tour to a hut in Whistler. It was my first such trip, and in the first such hours I had gone from anxious (as Pete taught us how to assess snow for avalanche risk) to smiling inside in glee at the beauty and quiet of empty fields of snow. And just us, and just the sound of the ‘skins’ on your skis, schussing gently uphill through the sparkling crystals of white.
The awe of majestic landscape is in my blood and bones and spirit. And the way these memories will pop up will make me freeze for a moment like I’ve been set in stone.
That day, in the Yosemite Valley Ansel Adams Gallery, Mum bought me a since cherished book, Ansel Adams Letters and Images 1916 -1984, I think it was back in 2013 or so in early days in California.
This compilation of Ansel Adams’ letters to friends and business acquaintances is a glimpse into the early days of photography’s growth in the 1920s and 1930s. Adams’ letters give us glimpses from what the painters thought, to use in politics, to the rapid adoption by the advertising industry for commercial ends (and artists’ view on that too).
And, the Letters are a reminder that (it seems to me) any successful artist comes paired with onehelluva promoter. For Adams, that person was Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer himself who stepped forward as the US promoter that drove photography’s acceptance as an accepted art form. I remembered being surprised to learn that Stieglitz – being such an astute commercialist – was married to Georgia O’Keefe, famed for abandoning New York for Santa Fe, New Mexico and a favorite female artist*.
* A sidebar on Georgia O’Keefe: Best known for her intense swathes of colour, O’Keefe’s most well-known paintings are portraits of the inside of flowers from close-up (like this, with a hat tip to the wonderful ‘reader’ website The Marginalian). O’Keefe’s approach leaves the viewer with the feeling of almost being in the flower – a hat tip to the close cropping technique of photographers at the time. I’ve adored O’Keefe ever since an adored friend at Epsom College focused on her style of painting on the easel next to me during A-Level Art in 1992.
From the early letters, I had (extremely naively) just assumed that the distribution of Adams’ work just took off on its own in the majesty of his stark black and white depictions of Yosemite Valley.
So it was a pleasure to visit the ‘In Our Time‘ exhibition at San Francisco’s De Yonge Museum, with Carolin’s Mum visiting for a month from near Frankfurt, Hessen in Germany.
The exhibition was a juicy juxtaposition of several era of Ansel Adams work, placed alongside both the photographers that influenced Adams at the time and the contemporary photographers that he has influenced today. And, the chronological placement of Adams’ work brought insights into his life, which all started growing up in San Francisco in a quiet home in Sea Cliff looking out over the Pacific (might I have turned out as Ansel Adams if I grew up in a quiet home in Sea Cliff, I remember thinking…).
And, and…you can’t beat celebrating the start of a period not working with an afternoon in an art gallery.
Highly recommended…
