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"A Great Tribute to a Great Artist"
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In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Ansel Adams' birth, John Szarkowski has selected what he considers Adams' finest works and offers a critique that ranks the photographer as one of the great artists of our time.
+5
Szarkowski, Director Emeritus of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, often selects unexpected and unfamiliar prints in his collection. The book is great in every way. It was printed in tritones at Meridian Printing on paper made in Toulouse, France. The plates are scaled to reflect the relative size of the original photographs; the book and slipcase are bound in a linen cloth made in the Netherlands. It is a fitting tribute to Ansel Adams' art.
Adams' pictures define for me what the term landscape means. This is a great collection of his work and should serve provide a firm foundation for Adams' elevation from a photographer to an artist.
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Craig L. Howe (PointedPundit)
Ranked #10
Ranked #10
I count among my worst faults an insatiable appetite for knowledge and meeting people. It was only natural that I gravitated toward journalism. Since 1987 as the Principal Consultant … more
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About this book
Ansel Adams at 100celebrates the centenary of one of America's best-loved photographers. This superlative catalog of an exhibition organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presents the most dramatic and the most delicate of Adams's formal compositions, from spectacular mountainscapes to grasses on a pond, all reflecting his avowedly religious relationship to nature. Previously unpublished examples of Adams's early images show how he worked through the day, using changing light and different vantage points to interpret a subject. A fascinating comparison of his darkroom techniques is given in two printings of a 1948 negative of Mount McKinley, made in 1949 and 1978 to very different effects, one brooding and luminous, the other crisp and monumental. (The conventional wisdom is to prefer the earlier, but this reviewer loves them both.) The text by John Szarkowski, director emeritus of New York MoMA's photography department, gives biographical details and gracefully places Adams in the history of 20th-century photography and the conservation movement. Impeccable technical standards were a hallmark of Adams's work, and this book follows his tradition. Each black-and-white image is a tritone, meaning that it was printed from three different plates corresponding to different parts of the original photograph's gray scale, resulting in an extremely rich chromatic range. Light really does appear to glisten off a wet rock, and white aspens to glow. The images have been very ...
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