The discovery of the new, as well as the knowledge of what has become history, is equally fascinating and is essentially the same process. Gallery of Classical Photography, which recently opened in New York, once again confirmed this opinion.
Ansel Adams. El Capitan, Winter. 1950
Ansel Adams. Al Capitan, Winter. 1950
Property of the Gallery of Classical Photography
The galleryās first exhibition project was āAmerican Landscape Photography. Ansel Adams and his apprenticesā, which consists of the works of the legendary American landscape painter and his followers. The works presented at the exhibition are original silver-gelatin prints by the masters themselves and allow for a detailed study of the hand-printed features of each.
In the history of world culture, the school of American landscape photography occupies one of its finest pages. The main personage of this pictorial tradition was the greatest American photographer, Ansel Easton Adams 1902-1984 . His work reflects the most important trends, views on the nature of photography, and innovative pictorial strategies of American photography of the first half of the twentieth century.
Photographers in the United States, actively involved in the international Pictorial movement, quickly recognized the need to allow photography to look more like photography than painting or prints. This trend, which was a kind of artistic practice, would be called āstraight photography.
āDirect photographyā as a mode of artistic expression is quickly gaining a wide range of followers, among whom one can find Alfred Stiglitz. This masterās series of photographs of cloudy skies, Equivalents, was a kind of premonition of that personal-object connection that will prove very important in understanding Ansel Adamsās photographs and his students.
When Adams turned 14, his parents gave him a Kodak Box Brownie model camera. The camera was capable of capturing 100 frames on paper-backed film. Adams takes his first photos in Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which will be closely linked to his photography life. At the age of 15, Ansel begins working in a San Francisco photo lab. At the same time, he began reading photography magazines, attending photography clubs and photo exhibits. He enjoys mountain climbing and, with his Uncle Frank, hikes in the Sierra Mountains in both winter and summer, developing skills that will come in handy later when shooting in harsh weather conditions at high altitude.
At the age of 17, he joined an environmental group dedicated to the protection and preservation of natural monuments, and will remain a member for life. It was at Sierra Club headquarters in 1928 that the first exhibition of photographs by Ansel Adams was held.
Along with photography, which was still amateur at the time, Adams pursued a career as a concert pianist. But after seeing Paul Strandās work in Taos, New Mexico, in 1930, he decides to abandon professional music lessons in favor of photography. Adamsā photographic works have a kind of musical harmony, the author himself compares the negative with notes and the print with the performance, striving for the purest and clearest sounding tone. In 1932, Adams founds the āf/64ā group which, in addition to him, includes Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Sonya Noskowiak, John Paul Edwards and Henry Swift. The group chooses as their name the term for the number of apertures available on a large-format camera 8Ć10 inches at which an optimally sharp image is obtained. The members of the group consciously rejected any manipulation of the print, demonstrating the photographerās emphasized respect for the subject and at the same time their desire to disassociate themselves from the increasingly overtaken aesthetic of pictorial pictorial means pictorial, pictorial photography. Despite the short existence of the f/64 group, it remains one of the most advanced photographic communities of American photography in the 1930s.
The publication of several illustrated books and the solo exhibition An American Place, which opened in 1936 at the Alfred Stiglitz Gallery, brings Ansel Adams international fame.
The year before, in 1935, Adams inherited the photography business of his son-in-law Harry Best, which still exists under the name āGallery of Ansel Adamsā anseladams.com .
During World War II, shocked by the actions taken by the U.S. administration against Japanese Americans, Adams visits the Manzanar War Relocation Center, where he creates a series of photographs first shown at MoMA and later published in book form.
Adams is not only a brilliant photographer and educator, but also a well-rounded expert in photographic technology, working with a wide variety of cameras and processes. Together with Fred Archer, Adams was the creator of the so-called zone system ā a technique that translates visible light into a system of densities on negative and paper and gives the photographer better control over the final image.
The annual seminars held by Ansel Adams in Yosemite National Park since 1946 have attracted photographers who have become adepts of his creative method. They, like Adams, choose for themselves the manner of āstraight photographyā: large-format camera, manual black-and-white printing from the negative and classic compositional construction. This suggests the formation of the Ansel Adams school of landscape.
Clyde Butcher, Bob Colbrener, Jeff Nixon, Alan Ross, John Sexton, Jody Forster, and John Wimberly were among the schoolās foremost representatives. Each of these authors is a continuator of the fine tradition of American landscape photography.
One of Ansel Adamsā most loyal followers and associates was Alan Ross b. 1948 , who became widely known as a photographer, educator, and expert in black and white hand printing. Alan Ross was an assistant to Ansel Adams 1974-1979 and was directly involved in publishing his books and teaching at Yosemite. It was Ross who won the right to make prints from the 24 negatives personally selected by Adams Limited Edition, Yosemite .
Alan Ross considers himself a classical photographer, but not at all a purist of style. He was able to formulate his own system of philosophical views on photography as a tool for self-expression. In this system, there is room for different photographic practices and approaches in obtaining and working on the image. This photographer does not deny the expressive qualities of digital technology ā the main thing for him is the ability to choose the right tool to express an idea.
The author himself chose a large format camera, hand printing, and the genre of landscape, which he perceives as an allegory of his inner space.
Ross adopted some of the techniques and pictorial strategies of Ansel Adams: for example, the use of classical composition, traditionally used in the image of the landscape, when all three plans create the illusion and symbolize the infinity of space. In doing so, the content of each of these plans, which are peculiar image phrases that constitute an overall visual statement, becomes important. Ross is also noted for his exceptional attention to the technical execution of the print, which allowed him to achieve dramatic contrasts and accentuate them for the viewer.
Bob Kolbrenerās photographic destiny Bob Kolbrener, b. 1949 are also closely connected with Yosemite National Park, Ansel Adams, and his work.
Colbrener had already been engaged in amateur photography for about five years when he visited Best Studio Gallery now the Ansel Adams Gallery in 1968. By his own admission, he was stunned by the work he saw there. Adamsā monumental and philosophical landscapes, solid and full of air, made such a strong impression on the young photographer that he decided to devote his photographic career to the landscapes of the American West.
A year later, Bob Colbrener returned to Yosemite as a student of the annual seminars conducted by Ansel Adams, and he has participated in them many times thereafter.
Colbrenerās teaching career began in 1973 by teaching summer courses in photography, and in 1977 Ansel Adams invited him as an instructor for his spring seminar. Since the 1980s, Colbrener became a photography consultant to Washington University, the University of Missouri, and the St. Louis Museum of Art.
His works are fine examples of classic American landscape photography, with a subtle inner balance. Shooting on a large format camera, hand developing and printing on barite photographic paper, and avoiding such manipulations as lightening or darkening the print, makes this photographer one of the most faithful followers of Ansel Adams.
John Sexton born John Sexton, nƩe Sexton . 1953 worked alongside Adams for nearly a decade, first as a janitor and then as a personal assistant and consultant. He helped prepare the famous Camera, Negative, and Print Trilogy for publication and became not only a recognized expert in shooting techniques, negative processing, and hand printing, but also an outstanding photographer.
In his works he continues to glorify the American landscape, which made him the most famous and influential photographer not only in the U.S., but also in the world. It was Adamsā creative vision that formed the basis of the photographic epic of the vastness of the North American continent, and the principles of the f/64 group became a model for photographersā pursuit of the true challenges of art through photography.
It is worth noting that John Sexton is selective in his subjects: at the end of the 20th century it is impossible to walk the same paths. His first successful series in Quiet light 1990 and Listen to the Trees 1994 have a much more intimate view of nature, stunning no less than the dramatic landscape shots of his colleagues and even his teacher. In the 1990s, he embarked on a new project. His Places of Power 2000 series no longer focuses on the natural landscape, but on the industrial one. The series, which grew out of photographs of power plants and dams, shows us, among other things, an object no less important than the rocks and canyons of national parks: the Space Shuttle.
Photographer Jeff Nixon b. 1945 , who began shooting in the 1960s and for many years was surrounded by Ansel Adams and his students, took inspiration for his black-and-white landscapes in the same places ā mountains, rocks, woods, canyons and prairies of the American West. Nor does he shun the ocean shore and, occasionally, urban landscapes. Except for the roads and buildings, however, its landscapes are desolate and pristine, just as they appeared to American colonists hundreds of years ago.
Whether we see the wooded slope of Yosemite Valley or an obscure, windswept sand dune in Death Valley, Jeff Nixonās prints will show us an almost dreamlike, immaculate landscape, presented in all its compositional completeness and weighted balance of dark and light tones.
The nature depicted by Nixon appears to the viewer as an idyllic world in which everything is perfect, and light plays a special place in this perfect environment. It is he who paints the landscape, revealing the specific properties of objects, endowing them with a mysterious shimmer.
His work is at times reminiscent of Ansel Adams, but Nixonās compositions are lighter and more fluid.
Jeff Nixonās workshops and exhibitions take place all over the United States. The photographer teaches regularly in California, continuing the work of his teacher. Along with John Sexton, he worked for the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Nixon is still a friend and supporter of his family and other students.
John Wimberley b. 1945 made his first photographs ā snapshots of air operations ā while serving in the Navy in the 1960s, where he worked as an aviation technician. After being discharged from the Army, he briefly practiced color landscape and street photography, documenting the hippie movement in California.
In February 1969, Wimberly worked on a series of photographs of trees in Del Puerto Canyon, California. It was this shooting that profoundly changed the vector of his work: he switched from color photography to black and white, and, choosing to concentrate on what he saw as the spiritual components of the world, he delved deeper into the study of psychology, mysticism and religion. In 1973, the first exhibition of his work was held.
Focusing on landscapes in the ā70s and ā80s, John Wimberly photographed places that were a source of energy and strength to him, returning to them over the course of twenty-five years.
His works attracted wide attention of critics and public. And a joint exhibition project with Ansel Adams confirmed John Wimberly in the status of an outstanding landscape painter.
Deciding to devote himself to photography, Jody Forster b. 1948 travels to Yosemite to attend the famous Ansel Adams seminars. For filming in Mexico and the state of Phoenix, Jody Forster moves to Arizona in 1976. The landscapes created during these years have a peculiar paradox. Although seemingly monumental, the landscape depicted in the photographs is perceived rather locally, as something mastered, where both artist and viewer feel comfortable. His compositions are classical, but far from static.
And the best example of this is the footage shot in 1978 in Shirok, New Mexico, that made Forster truly famous. His photographs of triangular-shaped cliffs, considered sacred by the Navajo Indian tribe, were subsequently his most frequently published images. The almost geometric form of the rocks, repeated many times in the plane of the frame, creates a complex and dynamic composition. The sense of space combined with the easy-to-read texture of the rocks makes these works a small graphic experience.
Jody Forster returns to the same scene several times. Then spends hours in a dark room trying to recreate the mood and energy of the landscape. His photographs contain a rich vocabulary of visual elements that help the author describe the interaction of natural forms with each other.
California Polytechnic University architecture graduate Clyde Butcher, b. 1942 had already been photographing architectural models for several years when he visited the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite. Adamsā work had a strong influence on Butcher and prompted him to turn to the genre of landscape. The photography of Floridaās ecosystems over time brought Butcher to prominence and brought him to the attention of the Water Resources Management Committee and the Committee on Archaeology and History, who invited him to participate in major federal projects. Over more than thirty-five years, he has captured untouched corners of the wilderness on film. His photographs of Ever Glades and Big Cypress Swamp National Parks Florida have a special place in his archive.
Clyde Butcher uses photography as a social modeling tool that can influence the viewer and raise pressing issues related to environmental protection.
Butcher was best known for his photographs of American landscapes made with a large-format camera and printed at large sizes up to 2Ć5 meters , which allowed him to convey not only details and texture, but also the unique character of a particular landscape.
Like Ansel Adams himself, the named photographers address the subject of landscape and related aspects. The mainstay of their work is the space of the natural environment.
An unprecedented exhibition of American landscape photography. Ansel Adams and His Students not only speaks to the continuity of creative generations and personal appropriation of classical examples, but also invites us to think about the interpenetration of the classics and the present.
We thank the Gallery of Classical Photography for contributing photos.
Address of the Gallery of Classical Photography: New York, Savvinskaya nab., d. 23, corp. 1
Tel. 495 510-77-13, 510-77-14
Hours of operation: Wednesday through Sunday, 12 to 9 p.m.
More information: classic-gallery
Ansel Adams. Yosemite Valley, Winter. 1938
Ansel Adams. Yosemite Valley, winter. 1938
Property of the Gallery of Classical Photography
Ansel Adams. Moon and Half Dome. 1960
Ansel Adams. The Moon and Half a Dome. 1960
Property of the Gallery of Classical Photography
John Wimberley. Misty Landscape With Pool. 1984
John Wimberly. Mysterious Landscape. 1984
Property of the Gallery of Classical Photography
Ansel Adams. Cathedral Peak and Lake. 1938
Ansel Adams. Cathedral Peak and Lake. 1938
Property of the Gallery of Classical Photography
Ansel Adams. Apalachicola . 1998
Ansel Adams. Apalachicola. 1998
Property of the Gallery of Classical Photography
Clyde Butcher. Deadlakes. 1997
Clyde Butcher. Dead Lakes. 1997
Property of the Gallery of Classical Photography
Alan Ross. Lagoon, Pfeiffer Beach. 1975
Alan Ross. Pfeiffer Beach. 1975
The property of the Classical Photography Gallery
John Wimberley. Carmel Valley From Hallās Ridge. 1993
John Wimberly. Carmel Valley, hilltop view. 1993
Property of the Gallery of Classical Photography
John Sexton. Oaks at Dusk, Carmel Valley, CA. 1988
John Sexton. Oak trees at dusk, Carmel Valley. 1988
Property of the Gallery of Classical Photography
What made Ansel Adams and his studentsā American landscape photography stand out? Was it their unique perspective, technical skills, or perhaps a different approach to capturing the beauty of the landscape? I would love to know more about what sets them apart and how their work has influenced the field of landscape photography.