Ansel Adams: Exploiting America's Mountains

Ansel Adams Looked Conspicuously like Yosemite Sam...

In the late 1910’s, an aspiring young concert pianist named Ansel Adams traded up the “88 ivories” for the “two and a quarter” size of a medium format camera. Armed with a love for America’s great national parks and photography skills to match, Ansel Adams made a name for himself during the depression by inspiring hope and wonderment in the hearts of Americans through the avant-guard nature of his breathtaking photographs.

Adams began his photography career during the onset of the depression, in a post World War I climate that held distrust for the avant-guard. Published in 1930, his first book, Taos Pueblo, was astronomically expensive. At $75, absolutely no one hit by the depression would even think of buying it. The limited book wound up (with great purpose) in the hands of the super-rich, and put Ansel in the spotlight of the major avant-guard art circles.

Like Agee and Evans and Lange and Taylor, Ansel’s first depression-era book was accompanied by captions, a more existential tone by the writer Mary Austin. Austin, whose work revolved mainly around the Native American, went on to write books about near-death experiences before her own death in 1934. It’s safe to say she wasn’t too worried about the Great Depression in her examination of the hardships of the Native American. Mary Austin on Taos Pueblo:

“The real mystery of creation resides in things, in the mystery of invisible energies which all our science struggles to resolve, spiritual energies which by their coalition constitute the Thing Itself.”

In his article The Natural Scene and the Social Good: The Artistic Education of Ansel Adams, Jonathan Spaulding speculates that Adams moved away from the avant-guard towards his better known “romantic” photographs of Yosemite because of the reality of events like the Great Depression and the World Wars, and America’s need to be shown the beauty right here in their own land. In this regard, many critics maintain Adams had a backwards career by moving towards realism as he aged. Spaulding writes:

“’Because of the romantic, magniloquent Adams of the later years’ is better known, he has been dismissed on occasion as ‘a throwback to the nineteenth century’”

In joining Group f/64, an artistic collective of photographers, Ansel began his romantic movement with the support of his close friend Dorthea Lange. Here, the two great photographers of the Depression, although friends, began to cut the world of fine art photography in two. Although Ansel and Lange helped each other in the dark room and even traveled together on photography expeditions, Adams was critical of the rise of Lange’s brand of photojournalism, and saw it is a threat to the rise of photography as a fine art. New publications like Life Magazine also seemed to threaten the movement by mass producing photography inexpensively to the general public. Where Adams was focused on technical skill, Lange emphasized politics. Both artists would be affected by the Depression, but in totally separate ways.

Adams had many entertaining written exchanges defending the significance of his photography of nature during the Depression after accusations like this one, from photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson: “the world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!”. In one response, Adams said: “our objective is about the same:…to trust our intuition in respect to what is beautiful and significant…to believe that humanity needs the purely aesthetic as much as it needs the purely material.” Youch! If only People magazine was around in the 1930’s!

Ansel Adams fought for beauty, something he found increasingly absent with the rise of 1930’s photojournalism. On the one hand, the Depression era artist had a political obligation to photograph real life. On the other, purists like Adams sought to heal and inspire through the consistency and everlasting beauty of nature. Like the rocks he captured in his famous photographs, Adams showed that beauty is never going to leave. In doing this, Adams showed the world that maybe the depression is temporary—unlike the rock formations Yellowstone, or the old trees of Yosemite.

BLOGGER-STYLE SIDENOTE: I had a pet chameleon named Ansel when I was growing up. He got real sick after two years and we had to hand feed him banana-flavored mixtures out of a syringe while he sat on a latex glove filled with warm water. We also had to give him shots in his left hind leg. Do you know how tiny chameleon legs are?