Word: 19th
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more a fable than a perceived reality. Ecologists and preservationists have made it a moral fable, an emblematic subject drenched in quasi-religious conviction. But this does not make it any less fabulous. The family in the Winnebago, lurching toward Yosemite to be reborn, cannot experience what in the 19th century used to be called the "Great Church of Nature" as it is seen in Adams' photographs: the experience has become culturally impossible. That has also worked to Adams' advantage. By now, his photographs of lakes, boulders, aspens and beetling crags have come to look like icons, the cult images...
Adams' photographs are too thoughtful and rigorous to be called nostalgic. But some of their poignancy comes from the paradox of their making. The replicated image and its mechanical multiplication of fact slowly wore down 19th century romanticism and moved irony to the center of modernist culture. The camera, as Critic Susan Sontag pointed out, makes us tourists, not just in Yosemite, but within all reality. With Adams, however, the camera became the romantic's last defense. There was no irony. What you felt?scrupulously and with great technical skill?is what...
...Adams family was well off then, but not as rich as it had been. Much of late 19th century San Francisco was built with lumber from the Washington Mill Co., which Ansel Adams' grandfather owned. But around the turn of the century the family lost six mills by fire and 27 lumber ships at sea, all of them woefully underinsured. After 1912, faced by the ruin of his timber interests, Adams' father, a mild, benevolent man with a deep amateur interest in astronomy, made a career at life insurance. He continued to raise his only child in Edwardian respectability...
When Adams' first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, was privately published in 1927, he was a fine technician who did not know much about the history of his own medium. He had not seen, or at any rate had not noticed, the work of his 19th century predecessors, Western landscape photographers like Carleton E. Watkins and Timothy H. O'Sullivan. He was still influenced by the so-called pictorialists, photographers given to arty blurs and poses. He also disliked the canonical painters of the American sublime, Bierstadt and Moran. "Indians and bears walking out to the edge...
...almost every other major 20th century photographer: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Diane Arbus and Imogen Cunningham, among the dead; Harry Callahan, Frederick Sommer, Paul Caponigro, and Fashion Photographers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, among the living. The great pictures of the 19th century are more expensive still. Last May two albums containing 100 early California and Oregon scenes by Carleton E. Watkins were sold for $198,000. "A print is amusing at $100," quips one art dealer...