I would say the AA's images did not 'capitalize' on the environmental movement...but instead were (and Ansel himself) an important part of it...and that the same message that grew out that movement and spurred by images such as AA's (and his activism) is still the most single message important today -- and his images still speak to that cause. If you think environmentalism is a thing of the pass, you are not paying attention.
The landscape photographers of the 1800's were a big influence on landscape photographers of the 20th Century...Adams took it further than just representational renderings of the landscape. He was not repeating their work...he took it further, which is one thing an artist tries to do.
You speak of his 'premise', you will need to back that up with facts. He had no one 'premise'.
To say an Adam's image "is ageless. That is what one might see and experience if one was there...and knew what to look for." is frankly not accurate.The reality as seen on his negatives and what representations of his initial image are vastly different in fact and tone from his beautiful images, not the least being "Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine". What is particularly attractive of Adam's images is the fact that he can make an dramatic and operatic image that amateur photographers with their tripods in his very holes can only strive to, because reality is not what is seen in Adam's images.
Extremely accurate. Referring to the Half Dome image...the scene depicted is so close to reality that you do not even reconize the fact. If you were standing there looking intently into the distance at Half Dome, lit up by the sun and the bight sky behind it, the foreground hills would darken with only minor detail and texture evident. Shift you attention to the foreground hills, one's pupils dialate and detail and contrast improves. His images accuracy captures the experience of being there. A printing that brought out the foreground detail and contrast (like many digital printers tend to do), the scene becomes ordinary and unlike the true experience.
Depicting reality accurately is not, and has never been the only job of photography...and with art in general, not important either way...it is up to the artist what is important.
Your suggestion that my attention span is diminished regarding the environmental movement is ... well... not a strong debating point. The 19th century environmental movement was one of conservation, concerned with the preservation of notable monumental features of nature or of significant areas of landscape. Theodore Roosevelt championed the US governments Federal response, but it should be noted that the photographs of Carleton Watkins (for whom Yosemite’s Mt. Watkins is names) had influenced the unprecedented decision to set aside Yosemite Valley as a state park in 1864, and the photographs of William Henry Jackson had figured in Congress’ decision to create the first national park, Yellowstone , in 1872. Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite grant in 1864. In the 1930's environmentalism was more concerned with the amelioration of the effects of the dust bowl. The post WW2 time was Adams time, a resistance to the development and increased public access to wilderness lands. Radiation and pollution were to replace concerns of conservation of natural wilderness in the latter 20th century. Adam's view of the transformative aspects of nature and conservation has little to do with reuse reduce and recycle.
Your refusal to accept the Adam's had a premise is puzzleing. It is clearly recognized that Adams himself felt that the Romantic artists were “sincere but limited ‘scene’ painters” who were primarily “commemorating in dramatic style the huge ‘external events’ of landscapes….Few examples of what I call the internal event were revealed.”
“Everyone has a right to visit Yosemite . But no one has the privilege of usurping it, distorting it, and making it less attractive to those who seek its experience in its simpler, unmanipulated state….The preservation of the primeval qualities does not relate to the mere protection of material objects. The significance of the objects of nature; the significance which concerns poets, dreamers, conservationists and citizens-at-large, relates to the ‘presence of nature.’ This is mood, the magic of personal experience, the awareness of a certain purity of condition .”
Adams was concerned with the ‘affirmation of life’….Response to natural beauty is one of the foundations of the environmental movement.”
Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, pushed his photography from hobby to art. Adams recalled this “first true visualization” in his autobiography
as depicting “not the way the subject appeared in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print.”
This artistic impulse was closely tied to the spiritual affirmation Adams found in the writings of Edward Carpenter, who articulated the achievement of an elevated state of being through connection to the unity of universal transformation. For Adams, that universality was in the natural scene.
Adams continued to convey a sense of separation between human society and the last bastions of wilderness In choosing to show only that smallest part of his beloved Yosemite in his creative works—that which was most wild and pristine—Adams set up a particular way of seeing the national parks, and even more broadly the natural environment, as divorced from the human world. His imagery attributed to the intellectual distinction between the human and natural worlds
that Adams represented in his photographs, and which the American public readily consumed. This matters because Ansel Adams’s vision is a cultural phenomenon, both as recognizable popular art and as a way of thinking about the natural world that was his subject. Recognizing the varieties of ways in which the human environment and natural world are involved, as Adams did not, might allow us to generate a new understanding of wilderness that will continue to protect the fundamental worth that Adams and generations of Americans have placed upon nature preserved.
Here really is the clincher. Adams never reconciled the elitist view of the preservation of the wild with the accessibility of people like himself much less of some one in a wheel chair or without the financial ability to mount a mule expedition.
Suggesting that Adams's work is accurate to the unaided eye is contradicted by Adams own writing.
The way Adams captured images was more than a mere reproduction of what he saw. Capturing highlights and shadows, empty skies and dense forests, each photo intensified and purified the actual scenes themselves. He explained this concept as the spiritual-emotional aspect of parks and wilderness; natural spaces are not solely practical but also provide a deeper and arguably transcendental experience that is unmatched by creations from the human hand. Adams advocated for limited “resortism” and restrictions on the overdevelopment of land and infringement on endangered species. In his photos, Adams sought to accentuate the “internal event” rather than just the “external event”.
“The effect of the natural scene on the artist is an emotional one,”He visualizes his work, bringing in the quality of esthetics, to try to convey an emotion. “It’s really the impact of recognition….Photographing ‘scenery’ is the very thing I don’t believe in, because that’s often a two-dimensional affair. So the element of immediate, emotional impact is very important.”
With all due regard, what you think the purpose of photography is (your last paragraph) is irrelevant to this debate, You have asked for proof which I have tried to present in terms of quotes and opinions of students of the study of photography and Adam's.
I ask you to support your opinions with quotes or perhaps academic opinions of others.
Lest I come off as irritating, we are just debating a subject and your appreciation of Adams's work in unquestioned as is the beauty of it. I really liked it when I was younger, but I am more of a portraitist. and less of a Western American scenic aficionado. Partly I suppose because Adams was best in his own milieu. He did come to Canada, his only foreign expedition but like his Alaskan and Hawaiian expeditions, not so worshiped.
Most of these words come from the Ansel Adams web site and from
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/...httpsredir=1&article=1165&context=nchcjournal
and I apologize for conflating Adam's and Adams's throughout my posts.
Makes sense to talk about an image that one either loves or hates. Fun either way.
