Word: greats
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 of America's vestigial pantheism...
...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...
...assiduously. By 14, endowed with a nearly perfect memory, he could take a score to bed with him, study it, and play it in the morning. His teacher was a very Prussian octogenarian named Frederick Zech, formerly professor of music at the conservatory in Potsdam. "He was a great disciplinarian," recalls the pupil. "He turned me from a Sloppy Joe into a good technician. If it hadn't been for that, I don't know what would have taken its place." But the effect of music on his later photography went deeper than inculcating a habit of technical excellence through...
Adams' photographic career began with the first trip he took to Yosemite, with his father in June 1916. He brought along a Kodak Brownie box camera. The trip was "a tremendous event," he recalls. From that moment, the Sierra?"that great earth gesture"?dominated Adams' life, changed his vocation, gave him his subjects. He was married there, to fellow Californian Virginia Best, a marriage that has lasted 51 years. One of his two children was born there, and not a year has passed since 1916 without his making at least one return visit. Often the visits have been elaborate...
...Adams' album from his 1916 trip, with its tiny sodium-browned prints of the Merced River, Half Dome and the scarps of the great valley, one can see the latent images of his work, struggling to become photographs. But as yet they were just vacation snapshots. "They couldn't have meant anything at all to anyone else," he says. "But as I kept doing it over several years, it began to mean more. I was seeing more. Then I got better cameras. Then I began to separate things, to see them more clearly." The first picture he took that...