In his book Air Guitar, critic Dave Hickey takes down Cezanne for making a picture be about itself, in essence a lesson about how it was made. This idea centered the great modernist project, which directed the image away from its role as talisman or icon—representing something or someone in the past—toward the sui generis object of inherent, present purpose.
Hickey steps back historically to note that Monet let you have both the paint and its object, "the Arcadian world of suburban real estate." He then notes that black-and-white photographs accomplish a similar melding of the modern and premodern: "Thus ... Impressionist painting and its descendants, along with black-and-white modernist photography, function as ideal viewing material for people who only hope they don't believe in magic and are consequently fearful of anything that looks like it ..."
This is worth keeping in mind when viewing Ansel Adams: America, which opened last week at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art. Organized by the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography, which Adams co-founded, the show bears a pompous title, likely to seduce tourists with all that God-inflected national destiny that small minds find in big mountains. Ansel Adams: Modernist or No Modernist? would not play as well with Peorians, probably, but it's more to the point.
Adams was a patriot and proud to meet with presidents, even Ronald Reagan, whom he had professed to "hate." An environmentalist, Adams was well-aware that his photographs had helped overwhelm Yosemite and other national parks. He absorbed and transformed the sublime strain of American art, the pantheism of Hudson River School painting and its echoes in the Western work of Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt. And, as Kevin Jackson noted in Britain's The Independent on the occasion of Adams' centenary in 2002, the photographer's "unfashionable inoffensiveness" had made him the most famous landscape photographer, ever.
"Considered cynically," wrote Jackson, "Adams's photographs of the American West are spiritual cousins to those Impressionist studies of rural France so beloved of Japanese financiers. You don't need a higher degree in fine art to find them easy on the eye. A less cynical comparison might stress that neither set of works seemed so immediately appealing to their earliest audiences, and if we find them agreeable now, it is because others once did some hard looking for us. The Impressionists once seemed wild and crazy; Adams once seemed chilly and ultraformalist."
Not at first, though. In his earliest work, before he forsook the piano for a career in photography, Adams was enamored of the "pictorialist" approach, which used soft-focus to render images like paintings. Separate encounters with photographers Edward Weston and Paul Strand led him to abandon pictorialism for pictures of deep, intense focus and broad tonal range. For a while, he associated with Weston's Group f/64, named for the sharp-focus lens aperture. "The pictures took on an emotional neutrality," observed Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, writing in Art in America. "They were no longer decorative and evocative, but made with the hard, supporting bone structure of Cubism."
You can see this in "Rose and Driftwood" (c. 1932), a rare still life in which the curls of petals play against worn whorls in the wood. Adams' modernist spirit was evident, too, in his successful courtship of photographer and pioneer dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who gave the young Adams a solo show at his An American Place gallery in New York. (Stieglitz's letter to Adams—"the prints are swell"—is a highlight among various artifacts displayed.) What Adams sensed, and sought, in Stieglitz was a modernism that made abstract forms of "real" images but which did so with lofty purpose. "Adams must have recognized that Stieglitz's insistence on a spiritual dimension had the potential to enrich and deepen the principally formal ideas of the f/64 group," wrote Phillips.
But to whatever degree the fissures, striations and snowy frostings of rock read as abstract compositions in such celebrated prints as "Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona" (1942) or "Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California" (1944), Adams always intended to capture not the scene but the feeling of witnessing it live. So while the sharp-focus tools of modernist photography made the picture about itself, Adams made sure it was also about the tiny horses grazing in the raking light of the middle distance of "Winter Sunrise."
And so with his most famous image, "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" (1941), which he exposed at the last possible moment, when the low sunlight still picked out the gravestone crosses of the settlement. The picture is both about the oft-told tale of its serendipitous making and an invitation to believe in magic. Adams wanted it both ways, and he was the rare photographer who made it happen.