Word: ansel
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...ANSEL ADAMS...
...striking, pellucid black-and-white images of the American West make Ansel Adams' photographs instantly recognizable. But the San Francisco-born Adams, whose love affair with photography began on a vacation trip to Yosemite in 1916 with a Brownie box camera, had a grander goal: to save those glorious landscapes. As early as 1950, he warned against reckless lumbering, overgrazing and pollution. But his most persuasive arguments were visual--pictures that forever showed why such treasures as Yosemite and Yellowstone were worth protecting...
...idea of landscape as epic, spiritual and transcendental. The cluster of feelings surrounding American landscape had come directly into modern art from 19th century images of sacred wilderness--God's fingerprint, there in the Catskills or the Grand Canyon. This would be faithfully preserved by photographers, like Ansel Adams at Yosemite. But 20th century painters from Dove and Hartley through Pollock conveyed them into more modern idioms, often with great power and poignancy. Landscape, in fact, was the matrix in which most of the impulses of American abstract art, except for its weaker strand of purist geometry, unfolded...
...innovative photographer who celebrated the ordinary; of cancer; in Atlanta. Callahan got his start in photography when he joined the camera club at his then workplace, Chrysler Motors. The self-effacing Midwesterner soon took to shooting city streets, clouds, pedestrians and, most memorably, his wife Eleanor. Influenced by Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz, Callahan infused his images with stark lines and contrasts. After teaching at the Bauhaus-inspired Institute of Design in Chicago, he ran the photography arm at the Rhode Island School of Design (see Appreciation, below...
This installation of 18 photographs can be easily examined in a period of ten to 15 minutes, although the combination of technical intricacies and striking imagery--as opposed to the artists' self-proclaimed inducement of "cultural critique and meta-commentary"--will undoubtedly inspire the viewer to linger. Tired of Ansel Adams, Robert Mapplethorpe or those ubiquitous sepia prints of rose-bearing children, you owe yourself a trip to the Fogg to see how these six contemporary photographers toy with spatial axes and optics. Afterwards, you may never look at your room in the same light again...