TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=90TT2327> <title> Sep. 03, 1990: The Man Who Captured Earth's Beauty </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990 Sep. 03, 1990 Are We Ready For This? </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> PHOTOGRAPHY, Page 62 The Man Who Captured the Earth's Beauty </hdr> <body> A new book, Ansel Adams: The American Wilderness, uses his pictures, some never before published, to recall his passion for wide-open spaces and the unspoiled environment By Richard Lacayo--From The American Wilderness by Ansel Adams. Nothing is harder to look at these days than photographs of magnificent landscape. Too many dark musings are apt to collect around them. The sunniest view of a hillside leads to thoughts about how long it may be before acid rain strips the place bare. Or else the urge takes hold to peer past the edge of the frame, to see where the photographer cropped out the shopping mall. Worst of all is the suspicion that even the most scrupulous image of natural beauty is a moral counterfeit, a soft fiction to disarm the hard fact that so much of the world is spoiled. Ansel Adams was one of the last great landscape photographers for whom beauty and truth could be the same thing. It was his good fortune to survey God's country before God stood aside and the developers came pouring in. His vision of wilderness could stand for the imagined essence of a nation where shopping strips and tract housing hadn't seeped into every corner. His open spaces could be tokens of nature's availability as well as its power. But he worked with a deepening sense that time was running out for the landscape he loved. He used to lug his heavy view cameras from one sacred precinct to the next, fearing all the while that the devil was just over the horizon, starting a strip mine. Driven in equal measure by his passions for ideal form and virgin nature--which for him amounted to the same thing--Adams was an artist who was also a polemicist. All that was needed to make him drop his camera and run to his typewriter was an assault on nature or an environmental policy from Ronald Reagan. And his pictures, no less than his letters to the editor, have always been in some measure a call to arms in defense of the earth. The collection of his work to be published in October, Ansel Adams: The American Wilderness (Little, Brown; $100), puts Adams the environmentalist alongside Adams the artist, juxtaposing photographs throughout his career with his anxious and devoted words about the wilderness. Many of the images are so familiar that they seem like national monuments on paper. Others are less well known. Some have never before been published. (When he died in 1984 at the age of 82, Adams left an archive of 40,000 negatives that curators and editors will be working their way through for decades to come.) It's the unfamiliar shots that serve his polemical purposes best. Because the pictures invite the eye to pause, the mind has a chance to proceed from the instant pleasures that each scene affords to the slower-acting questions that it carries in tow. Time was always a presence in Adams' pictures. They always prompted thoughts of the primordial past, the centuries of geologic bump and grind that formed Yosemite in California or Alaska's Glacier Bay. Now they also bring to mind a different kind of pressure from the future, from the pollution and crowding that will refashion the earth every bit as thoroughly as the scraping of tectonic plates ever did. The recognition that even the eternal is strictly temporary threatens to turn the whole body of Adams' work, once so apparently timeless, into a historical document, the record of a lost world. Here is the Pacific Coast in 1968, a rain forest from the 1950s, a mountain range during World War II--places as they appeared before the deluge of sludge and the greenhouse effect. Some of his most famous sites are vanishing. A good part of Mono Lake has been drained down an aqueduct to supply Los Angeles. Because he worked so often in the protected enclaves of the national parks, many of the places that Adams recorded are more resistant to exploitation than most open land. (Not that park boundaries aren't porous too, and always under pressure to admit oil drillers or cattlemen, or loggers who see lumber where Adams saw the enchanted forest.) But Adams wasn't interested primarily in documenting the parks as such. He let the wilderness stand for the potency and sweetness of nature generally. And he hoped his pictures would lead his audience to grasp the link between themselves and the wider world. Adams once described the experience as it came to him during a climb through the Sierra Nevadas: "The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor; there was nothing, however small, that did not clash in the bright wind, that did not send arrows of light through the glassy air. I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light...There are no words to convey the moods of those moments." Adams' first viewfinder was the bedroom window of his boyhood home on the outskirts of San Francisco. He would spend hours looking across the Pacific shoreline of the Golden Gate, a place that was still mostly open land in the early years of the century. Then a building boom hit, and the future conservationist felt his earliest pangs of regret. "Most thought it progress," he would later write. "I wistfully remembered the sand, sea grass, and lupines." Adams didn't know it at the time, but his sense of loss linked him to a long tradition in the American temperament. Even the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville could testify to it, a feeling of Arcadia-in-jeopardy that came to him during the trip across America that he began in 1831. It was the "consciousness of destruction," he said, that gave "such a touching beauty to the solitudes of America. One sees them with a melancholy pleasure; one is in some sort of a hurry to admire them." All through the 19th century, American artists and writers worried about the ax that they knew was cutting through the deep forest and the national myths it embodied. By the 1840s, Ralph Waldo Emerson could note glumly in his journal that he heard "the whistle of the locomotive in the woods" in the tones of a man who was hearing the last trumpet for the whole of creation. It was in the same years that a nearly religious attachment to landscape found its way into American art. In the canvases of the luminist painters who were centered upon New York's Hudson River Valley, God and nature were more or less interchangeable. Adams professed to dislike the work of luminists who came West, like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. To his eye it was too full of contrived anecdotes. But he carried their pantheism into photography when painting was done with it. Like them, he saw the landscape through a sensibility poised at the point where aesthetic pleasure meets religious awe. Laid over that was the force of his other great conviction, in the clarifying power of modern art. Adams was a central figure among the generation of American photographers who during the 1920s and '30s converted from pictorialism--a turn-of-the-century practice that valued fuzzy effects and sentimental posturing--to an aesthetic that put faith in sharp focus and plain facts. His letters and occasional writings from that period have some of the evangelical clamor of modernism's pathbreaking days, an era of artists' manifestos full of cocksure proclamations of truth and feverish calls to remake the world. "It was like the Annunciation!" he once said of his conversion to straight photography. Like his friend Edward Weston, Adams would be a romantic working in a realist's medium, driving it into visionary realms under the power of his own ecstasies. (A typical passage from one of his letters, written on a train trip through Wyoming: "Just passed an acre of blue lupine, with snow peaks in the distance--it's almost too much.") Yet he never ventured into sheer mysticism. A more susceptible photographer like Minor White was apt to see the landscape as a divine message board, thick with bulletins from the world beyond. Adams was more earthbound. He figured that a rock was pretty much a rock, even if it might point the mind toward a less material realm. His trick of being down to earth even when he was up in the clouds, a pragmatist's rapture, is one thing that made his art quintessentially American. So is his very choice of wilderness as a subject. Adams was one of those who believed that the future of the American landscape was in some way crucially linked to the fate of the Republic itself. He shared Walt Whitman's sense that "democracy most of all affiliates with open air, is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature." Inevitably, some of Adams' pictures have become more deeply embedded in the American consciousness than the actual rocks they depict. Visitors crowd Yosemite each year to match the real Sierras against the outline that he drew in their imaginations. A good number of them probably come away disappointed by the real thing, not realizing that his images were never intended to be read as literal records of the scene. As the post-Impressionists had done in painting, Adams made photographs not so much to testify to how a scene appeared as to testify to how it had made him feel, repeatedly reprinting his negatives until he got what he was after. Adams consumed his subject so completely he left many of the landscape photographers who followed him no choice but to follow a radically different path. The best of the present generation have decided to report the landscape in the diminished circumstances in which most of us find it. The pictures of someone like Robert Adams (no relation to Ansel) are apt to be about the durability of nature as it suffers the chafing of civilization, about tough patches of wild flowers camped in a highway interchange or saplings that the developers haven't chased away yet from Southern California. Richard Misrach makes pictures in which the Western desert might shed its radiance around a couple of nylon pup tents and a pickup truck. David Hanson acknowledges the paradoxes of beauty, taking aerial color shots of chemical waste dumps and strip mines from an altitude that makes them appear to be bright, seductive abstractions. Work like theirs wrings a hard-won beauty out of problematic circumstances. But we can't be blamed if we turn back with relief to the more straightforward pleasures of Ansel Adams. The danger is that we might be satisfied with beauty alone, whereas Adams would have wanted us to proceed from the pleasures of the senses to the deeper operations of judgment. He hoped his pictures would lead the viewer to conclusions to which he had been led himself. It wasn't merely that he believed in the power of wilderness to freshen the senses, though he believed in that too. He felt that the natural world held whatever hopes remain for the recuperation of our perennially injured spirits. Which is why it's important that his pictures are reminders of that world's frailty as well as its vigor. They are emblems of a shared intuition--that as the wilderness contracts, our hearts shrink with it. </body> </article> </text>