America’s Wilderness Eye

Ansel Adams was a craftsman, artist, visionary, teacher, conservationist, mountaineer, jovial raconteur and the nation’s premier landscape photographer. He is receiving a new burst of attention as the exhibit, “Ansel Adams at 100,” tours the the U.S. and Europe on the centennial of Adams’ birth Feb. 20, 1902. A companion book of the same title has been published by Little, Brown and Co.

Many of the photos are familiar: the crashing waters of Yosemite Falls, the brooding visage of Half Dome, a shimmering Mt. McKinley, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” and a winter dawn blushing Mt. Whitney. A few are not so well known. And some side-by-side prints show how Adams’ printing style progressed.

But always they are striking images, most of them from his beloved Sierra Nevada and Yosemite Valley, from sharp rugged granite to the velvet of a dogwood blossom. Adams raised nature photography to an art, and he inspired a whole generation of photographers after opening his first workshop in Yosemite in the 1930s and establishing the department of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1940.

Meanwhile, Adams served 37 years as a director of the Sierra Club and lobbied extensively--and successfully--for greater protection for the national parks. A Yosemite peak and a nearby wilderness area are named for him. Americans, and particularly Californians, are the richer for his work. Adams died in 1984.

A new generation of Americans and Europeans can become acquainted with Adams’ genius. The Adams show already has been to San Francisco. It will be at the Art Institute of Chicago Feb. 20-June 2, the Hayward Gallery in London July 4-Sept. 22, Kunstbibliothek in Berlin Oct. 10-Jan. 5, 2003, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Feb. 2-April 27, 2003, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York July 9-Nov. 4, 2003.