What makes an artwork successful? Its ability to transport viewers into the artist’s subjective experience? The technical ingenuity of its execution? Or perhaps the depth of emotion, awareness, or action it can provoke?
The work of Ansel Adams (1902-1984) provides a fascinating case study for these questions across all its dimensions. An American landscape photographer, Adams captured not only the pristine natural world but also his subjective interpretation of it, a display of immense technical skill and a deeply personal sense of place. Adams’ oeuvre and influence are thoughtfully explored within the Harry Ransom Center’s exhibition, Visualizing the Environment of Ansel Adams and His Legacy. Curated by Dr. Steven D. Hoelscher, the exhibition showcases Adams’ range, celebrates his inspirations, and explores the legacy of his work in the art world and beyond.
View of the Harry Ransom Center’s exhibition. Photo: Arianne Ohman
The exhibition begins by examining Adams’ approach of “visualization” — the photographic expression of how the environment looks and feels to the artist. Adams himself stated, “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” Far from being a mechanical duplication of reality, Adams’ photographs reflect a personal and creative connection between artist and landscape, animated by a mastery of technique.
Every photograph begins as a catching of the eye, the recognition of something worth remembering. Then begins the translation of reality from three dimensions into two, a process with a million subjectivities informed by the artist’s intuition and skill. For Adams, this process required awareness of place — knowing when the lighting would be just right and where the angle would be most extraordinary. Employing filters to emphasize tonal contrast, darkroom manipulations to adjust exposure, and precise camera settings tuned to the right shutter speed and aperture, Adams’ photographs transport viewers beyond mere reality and enable us to glimpse the landscape as he does: glorious, mystical, sacred.
Adams’ photograph Monolith – The Face of the Half Dome (1927) stands as an early milestone of his artistic process. Adams described the work as his “first true visualization,” where he “had been able to realize a desired image, not the way the subject appeared in reality, but how it felt [to him] and how it must appear in the finished print.” To create the image, Adams applied a red filter to deepen the tone of the sky to nearly black without obscuring the profile of the Half Dome, whose snow cap appears as a fissure in the sky, lighting up the dark expanse as if the mountain itself is incandescent.
Ansel Adams, “Monolith – The Face of the Half Dome,” 1927, (printed 1929), gelatin silver print, 8 x 9″
The exhibition’s selection of photographs captures the full scope of Adams’ fascination with natural beauty. Subjects range from the delicate detail of a solitary rosebud to the vast expanse of a Californian mountain valley. Some images appear as portals into the wilderness while others verge on abstraction, inviting the viewer to consider familiar sights from new perspectives. One such striking image, Dunes, Oceano (1963), reimagines a desert landscape as a symphonic interplay of shadow and lines, evoking both the silky texture and gritty abrasion of sand in a composition that appears spliced together along an upward-sloping diagonal.
Ansel Adams, “Dunes, Oceano,” 1963), gelatin silver print, 8 x 9″
Eventually, one ceases to notice the absence of color in Adams’ images. The visual richness conveyed with subtle gradations of light and dark, the sharpness of forms, and the emptiness of space transcends the need for color. Its exclusion enables viewers to better appreciate the contrast, detail, and texture of each photograph, distancing us from objective reality and drawing us deeper into Adams’ subjective, resonant world.
Beyond celebrating Adams’ inspirations and artistic vision, the exhibition also explores his legacy and the broader impact of his work. Central to this legacy is Adams’ role in championing photography as both a fine art and a powerful tool for environmental advocacy. His images demonstrated that photography could transcend its traditional roles as a commercial or documentary medium, becoming a means of evoking reverence and emotional depth. The unique capability of Adams’ photos to inspire awe and emotion made his work particularly effective in environmental activism. In particular, the exhibition highlights This is the American Earth, a collaborative book created by Adams and photography curator Nancy Newhall. Pairing an environmental manifesto written by Newhall with over 84 striking images of the American wilderness — 43 by Adams and the remainder by 30 other photographers — the book is credited with encouraging the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964.
Building upon this exploration of Adams’ influence, the exhibition finally turns to how his legacy has shaped subsequent generations of artists. While Adams’ work for fostering environmental consciousness and validating photography as an artistic medium paved the way for many behind him, some artists were troubled that his images presented an idealized world unmarred by human impact. In recent decades, photographers have often chosen to instead visualize the environment in direct relation to humanity, highlighting its destruction, transformation, cultivation, and historical significance. Through a selection of images from photographers such as Mark Klett, Dawoud Bey, and Bruce Davidson that focus on human imprint that Adam often chose to exclude, the exhibit leaves us wondering if absence and inclusion are equally weighty decisions in the creation of a photograph.
The exhibit presents a comparison of two photographs of the same subject – one captured in 1872 by Timothy O’Sullivan and the other in 1979 by Mark Klett – each “visualizing” the scene in strikingly different ways. Photo: Arianne Ohman
The Harry Ransom Center’s exhibit thoughtfully examines the ingenuity and influence of Ansel Adams’ work not just as an artistic achievement but as a moment of evolution in art history: for photography, activism, and visualization. Adams’ unique ability to lend viewers his eyes and mind through the creation of each photograph, execute his creations with technical brilliance, and conjure emotional, political, and artistic responses to his work leaves no doubt as to what kind of artist he is — and to the enduring influence of his singular vision.
Visualizing the Environment of Ansel Adams and His Legacy is on view at the Harry Ransom Center through February 2.
