Word: ansel
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...skitter over the keys, assaulting the same phrase again and again. "Damn," he says, "I've lost it." But not altogether. Once you have practiced to concert discipline, even 50 years ago, the traces still show. "There used to be a relationship between my piano and my photography," says Ansel Adams. "I guess it's one-sided...
Today, at 77, Ansel Adams is the most popular "fine" photographer in America. His images of landscape, and particularly of Yosemite National Park in California, have become almost indistinguishable from their subjects: to many people, Yosemite is the apparition on Adams' viewfinder. "Won't it be wonderful when a million people can see what we are seeing today!" exclaimed John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, as he gazed on Yosemite seven decades ago. Last year 2.7 million tourists went to Yosemite. One may fairly assume that most of their innumerable frames of 35-mm and Polaroid film were...
Somewhat like his photos, Adams is larger than life. More than a million copies of his books have gone into print. The latest, Yosemite and the Range of Light (New York Graphic Society; $75), will be published next week. The publication is timed to coincide with "Ansel Adams and the West," a two-month retrospective of 153 of his landscape photographs, organized by the Museum of Modern Art's director of the department of photography, John Szarkowski, and opening at MOMA next week. In workshop sessions over the years, Adams has personally taught at least 4,500 students. Original prints...
...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...
...MOMA's Szarkowski, the reasons run deeper: "Ansel likes to look simpler than he is. He prints differently because he's a different man. In some contexts he'll admit that printing isn't ultimately a technical problem. But when you say that the changes in his prints imply changes in him, he denies it. He's a more interesting artist than he knows...