Graduation Dress (1948)

“Yosemite: Art of an American Icon,” Part II, is on view at the Autry National Center’s Museum of the American West in Griffith Park through April 22, 2007.

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Ansel Adams is America’s most over-appreciated photographer. The popularity of his landscapes and perpetuation of his image as the foxy ol’ grandpa of the environmental movement go on unabated, despite the fact that wilderness as he envisioned it is rarely found outside national parks today--parks that now bear as much resemblance to reality as Disneyland’s Main Street does.

But there is still one area in which Adams has not gotten the recognition he deserves: portraiture, a genre he worked in as long as in landscape. Tight framing that excluded backgrounds was typical of early portraits, whereas later ones, such as a 1945 study of photographer Edward Weston seated on the roots of a massive tree, tended to show subjects in their surroundings.

A tree serves as a foil in the portrait seen here, too. Its craggy bark sets off the pure, starchy whiteness of the dress and the innocence of youth for which it stands. The young woman holds her arms in a self-conscious way and bends awkwardly toward the tree, which bends back toward her as if in sympathy with her discomfort before the camera. Having been in Yosemite a long time, the tree is used to being photographed by Ansel Adams.