Ansel Adams, in Sharper Focus

On Aug. 4, “Ansel Adams at 100,” the first major retrospective of the photographer’s work since his death in 1984, opened at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. Curated by John Szarkowski, director of the department of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991, the show commemorates Adams’ centennial (he was born Feb. 20, 1902) and offers a fresh interpretation. Now as famous for posters and postcards as for fine art, Adams is something of a pop figure. But Szarkowski sees him as an important Modernist and an artist of profound vision.

From San Francisco, where it will be on view until January, the show will travel to Chicago, London and Berlin before arriving in Los Angeles in the summer of 2003 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and then moving on to MOMA in New York.

Five days before the opening, while captions were still being stenciled on gallery walls, Szarkowski talked about Adams and the exhibition as he strolled among the 141 photographs and pointed out his discoveries and choices with a passion deepened by decades of looking at pictures.

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Question: Ansel Adams is arguably the most popular photographer in America. Many people assume they already know his work. Has his art been obscured by his popularity?

John Szarkowski: Virtually all of the work we’ve seen in the last 40 years has been selected from the checklist of the very large exhibition in 1963 shown at the DeYoung [Museum in San Francisco] by Ansel and [photo historian] Nancy Newhall. I don’t mean to suggest that wasn’t an intelligent and significant exhibition. But I think it did serve agendas that Ansel and Newhall had at the time which I don’t have to worry about. I don’t have to worry about the effect of the show on Ansel’s subsequent professional career. He did. In 1963, he was a famous photographer who was by no means financially secure. So he had to worry about whether people would like it. And also he and Nancy had profound misgivings about the state of American photography, and so they wanted to put that right and demonstrate what the real values should be.

And then, as Ansel became more popular, he was, as most of us would be, pleased. [He laughs.] And he listened to the applause. How can I say it? He wasn’t really polling the public; in his books and shows he was sincere. But sincerity can be influenced by whether people like your work or not, and so he became more of a public figure and he thought of himself that way. And he wasn’t really creating new work while the old work got more and more attention. And I think he lost touch with the original impulse that had formed the work.

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Q: Is regaining that original spirit one of the purposes of the show?

Szarkowski: I’m not trying to revise Ansel Adams or invent an Ansel Adams that’s more available to the modern sensibility. I’m trying to look at the total work of an artist for whom I have the highest regard and a deep sense of obligation, and to say, “What in this work is the achievement on which we will base our opinion of Adams as a 20th century artist?”

And it’s as a highly original landscape photographer that that judgment will be based. Some people will say, “Oh, he just photographed what Carleton Watkins did.” But he didn’t. Watkins was a great photographer who photographed Yosemite as geology. Landscape for most of the great 19th century photographers was fundamentally immutable. But Adams invented a landscape that was defined by all the central issues that define Modern art--relativity, mutability, the provisional character of even a mountain. You turn your back on the mountain [Szarkowski peers over his shoulder] and turn back, and it’s changed because a different light is falling on it. That plastic, constantly changing quality of the prehistoric world is what Adams’ photographs are really about.

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Q: When did you first meet Adams?

Szarkowski: I met Ansel in 1962. But my relationship goes back much further than that. I read and tried to understand his [1935 book] “Making a Photograph” when I was a teenager. I was a photographer for many years before I became a curator.

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Q: In those early years, how many California photographers were well-known in the East?

Szarkowski: Oh, a lot. Ansel, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, Bill Garnett, the great aerial photographer, I’m sure I’m leaving out some. California had been a photographic hotbed for a while. On the East Coast, people knew [Alfred] Stieglitz, [Paul] Strand, [Charles] Sheeler--there was work to look at, to base one’s ideas on. In the West, the photographers grew up in relative isolation. Adams met Weston in about 1929. At first, he wasn’t overwhelmed by his work. Imogen was up the coast, farther north. So they were much more autodidacts, and it’s fascinating that so many of them made such a large contribution.

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Q: You’ve written that Adams was out of step with the social realism of most photographers during the Depression and World War II.

Szarkowski: That’s right. Not only Eastern, but Western critics too, like [Kenneth] Rexroth, wrote that if Adams and Weston were going to amount to anything, they’d better get with the social activist program and stop photographing rocks and mountain peaks and Sierra lakes. In the ‘30s, and then the war, it did seem as if civilization might be snuffed out by the powers of darkness. It all left a mark on Ansel. No one wants to be accused of being socially irrelevant.

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Q: Then, ironically, in the ‘60s, he became a hero to environmentalists.

Szarkowski: [He laughs.] After the fact, long after the work had been done. After Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold--and Ansel was a part of that; after the whole growing awareness that ecological thinking was a central survival issue, not an ornamental or marginal issue, captured the public’s imagination. So at that point, Ansel’s work became relevant. But I don’t think that’s what he was thinking when he actually did the work.

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Q: In your catalog essay for the show, you point out that even though his first photographs were published in the Sierra Club Bulletin, and he shot his early photos while leading Sierra Club trips to the High Sierra, you don’t think that “social service” was the push behind Adams’ photography. Did that insight inform your choice of photographs for the show?

Szarkowski: The show is about Ansel Adams the artist, not Ansel Adams the conservation leader, not about him as a photography teacher or as a spokesman for photography as a fine art, although he was all of these things.

I don’t think you can ask artists to serve some useful end while they’re being artists. It will compromise their art. Now maybe that’s not true in all cases. Maybe Fra Angelico didn’t have to worry about the problems of painting, maybe all he had to worry about was faith and the painting came out automatically. But I doubt it. Artists have to deal with the material that most deeply fixes their attention, that they love most. Otherwise they’re shirking their responsibility as artists. Of course, every artist hopes his work will be useful. It’s like expecting a baseball player to be a model for American youth when what they really can do is throw or catch a ball.

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Q: In your writing about Adams you often use the word “ineffable” as if there’s a mystical sense of nature about his work. You quote this gorgeous passage Adams wrote about a trip to the mountains in 1923: “It was one of those mornings when the sunlight is burnished with a keen wind and long feathers of clouds move in a lofty sky. The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor,” and it goes on. These are not the words of a documentary photographer.

Szarkowski: Well, actually, documentary photography, if it’s any good, has something like that. And everything is a document; a photo on your driver’s license is a document. So is the Sistine ceiling a document about the ambitions of popes, the state of fresco painting at the 15th century, the beliefs of the Old Testament and the New Testament.

What Ansel at the top of his form in the ‘30s and ‘40s was trying to do was make a photograph that would somehow be consonant with his experience of the wild, prehistoric world. That’s when he was most alive, when he was out there, especially in the High Sierra. His ambition was to make a picture, a little piece of paper with black and white marks on it that would be like that.

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Q: You’ve included pictures that will be a revelation to many people, intimate photographs of grasses, like the cover picture on the catalog, that are so different from Adams’ massive landscapes.

Szarkowski: In the later years of his career, that lyrical, more personal, more private work got edited out in favor of the more dramatic, the more rhetorical, the more declamatory--all about the grandeur of natural beauty, victory and success. But he did understand nature has as much to do with dying as living, and he didn’t shrink from that at all. Some of his pictures are in the best sense tragic.

[He stops in front of “The Dead Trees Against Black Sky,” 1925.]

All these marvelous dead stumps and trees. I had never seen this until I saw it at the home of Michael and Jean Adams, Ansel’s son and daughter-in-law. The minute I saw it, I thought of the Munch. [He spreads his hands to his face like the painting “The Scream”.]

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Q: You mounted a major show, “Ansel Adams and the West,” at MOMA in 1979. How does this show differ from that?

Szarkowski: I didn’t know the work as fully then and, of course, Ansel was alive and there was a book that had been edited before I began working on the show.

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Q: So the book determined a lot of what would be in the show?

Szarkowski: Not everything, but in deference to the artist, one wanted to have as much to do with the book as one could in good conscience.

Many of these pictures I’d never even seen before. I spent four years finding these prints and much less time on the 1979 show.

Here’s another photograph that I’d never seen. [He points out “Lake McDonald, Glacier National Park, Montana, 1942.”] It’s a knockout! And here are two more photos of the same scene. This one first; then one with a slightly longer lens and the opportunity changes--these wonderful sharp, jagged peaks are replaced by this incredible plastic, more spatial view. Then something happens and a fish jumps and you get these ripples, and he raises the horizon and goes to the most voluptuous of the three, all about that skin, that surface of the water.

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Q: Adams’ printing style changed over the years, and you’ve chosen to include mostly early prints, whereas most of the books, calendars and postcards that most people know are printed in the later style. Why is that?

Szarkowski: The later prints are heavier, darker, less classical in feeling, more obvious.

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Q: The earlier prints seem softer.

Szarkowski: They have more to do with the quality of the air and less to do with the graphics of shape. [Now he has stopped at “Mt. McKinley and Wonder Lake, Alaska,” 1948.] This is the most astonishing example of the way the work changed.

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Q: You’ve put up two prints of the same negative--

Szarkowski: Done more than 20 years apart, in 1949 and 1978.

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Q: The later print has a kind of melodrama that reminds me of Adams’ famous late book “Yosemite and the Range of Light.”

Szarkowski: Yes. My personal view is that the later is an inferior work. But it wasn’t my picture, it was his picture [he chuckles], and he made that later print, and not only that, he didn’t throw it away.

[He moves to a photograph titled “Late Autumn, Merced River,” 1947, and a 1950 shot made at the same place.] Look how the two pictures change in the same way that two prints from the same negative change.

[He hurries over to another set of examples: “Aspens, Northern New Mexico.”]

The later [print] is declamatory, less lyrical--the negative was made in 1958, one print in the early 1960s and the other 18 years later. It almost looks as if the whole landscape was brought into the studio and lighted.

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Q: Almost garish.

[Szarkowski approaches some large, open photo albums on a pedestal nearby.]

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Q: These are photo albums of Sierra Club trips that Adams led?

Szarkowski: Yes, and here are pages we’ve blown up and put high on the wall so more than one person can look at them at once. It’s wonderful to see the actual thing from which he chose the pictures he liked [to use as part of his own work]. Anyone who spends a half-hour looking at these books gets a free education in how to be a photographer.

[David Ross, director of the museum, arrives and contemplates the blowups.]

Szarkowski: These are all of the same scene, but the light changes, or the vantage point changes.

David Ross: There’s the calculus of landscape. It’s not simple geometry where you just change one angle.

Szarkowski: You change one and they all change, an infinite number of choices.

Ross: [Stopping in front of “Mt. Whitney.”] Don’t tell me Richard Serra doesn’t learn from this, or Ellsworth Kelly. To hear [Kelly] talk, you’d think everything he got, he got from looking at shadows--all those ideas about the way lines move....

[Szarkowski propels us into the “Legacy” section at the end of the exhibition.]

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Q: This last section shows Adams’ influence on other landscape photographers?

Szarkowski: Well, yes, but not directly in a laying-on-of-hands way. But the way that Ansel has changed our sense of what landscape [is] makes this possible. The idea of the landscape as certain, given, permanent, but something that’s changing constantly and that it’s anywhere--[in details like] grass in the water. The photographers who have learned best what we now understand about landscape photography don’t make photographs that look like Ansel’s.

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Q: And the landscape is no longer necessarily untouched wilderness.

Szarkowski: Here’s [Robert] Adams. His earliest, most important work was done on the eastern slope of the Rockies when he began to discover that Denver, the outlying areas around Denver, that he had known and loved was changing with great rapidity and not, in his view, for the better. He didn’t go to Yellowstone. He stuck with his own landscape, both to show what people were doing that was wrong, or unfortunate, and also to show it was still his landscape. He had to see what was still beautiful, what was still salvageable. He understood if you didn’t love your own home, it didn’t do any good to go to Yellowstone. [He strides across the gallery to Geoffrey Jones’ “Vimy Ridge.”] And here--spectacular! It’s an asbestos mine, or tailings actually.

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Q: Strangely beautiful.

Szarkowski: And if it seduces you, if it is on some grounds a pleasure to look at, then it almost forces you to think about what it’s about or what it means. *

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“Ansel Adams at 100,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St., San Francisco. $5-$9. Through Jan. 13. Closed Wednesdays. (415) 357-4000.