From the introduction to The Portfolios of Ansel Adams, 1977:
"Ansel Adams was born in 1902, in San Francisco. He began to photograph the landscape of the American West more than fifty years ago, before the Model A had begun to replace the Model T. Before that time there were no superhighways, no motels, and no passenger airlines. San Francisco and New York were, by crack train, four splendid days apart.
In those days the world was still a reasonably commodious place, and it was natural to assume that its various parts would retain their discrete, articulated character if they could be protected from the depredations of the lumber, mineral, and water barons. Conservation was a matter of seeking the support of the people against the encroachment of the powerful few. If one could describe in photographs how much like Eden was Yosemite Valley the electorate would presumably save it from its exploiters. It was not foreseen that the people, having saved it , would consider it their own, nor that a million pink-cheeked Boy scouts, greening teenage backpackers, and middle-aged sightseers might, with the best of intentions, destroy a wilderness as surely as the most rapacious of lumbermen, who did his damage quickly and left the land to recover if it could.
It has developed, in other words, that to photograph beautifully a choice vestigial remnant of natural landscape is not necessarily to do a great favor to its future. This problem is now understood, intuitively or otherwise, by many younger photographers of talent, who tend to make landscapes of motifs that have already been fully exploited and that have therefore nowhere to go but up. It is difficult today for an ambitious young photographer to photograph a pristine snowcapped mountain without including the parking lot in the foreground as a self-protecting note of irony.
In these terms Adams' pictures are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition. It is possible that Adams himself has come to sense this. The best of his later pictures have about them a nervous intensity that is almost shrill, a Bernini-like anxiety, the brilliance of a violin string stretched tight.
It does not seem likely that a photographer of the future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust, and belief that Adams has brough to it. If this is the case, his pictures are all the more precious, for that then stand as the last records, for the young and the future, of what they missed. For the aging -- for a little while -- they will be a souvenir of what was lost.
John Szarkowski"
"Ansel Adams was born in 1902, in San Francisco. He began to photograph the landscape of the American West more than fifty years ago, before the Model A had begun to replace the Model T. Before that time there were no superhighways, no motels, and no passenger airlines. San Francisco and New York were, by crack train, four splendid days apart.
In those days the world was still a reasonably commodious place, and it was natural to assume that its various parts would retain their discrete, articulated character if they could be protected from the depredations of the lumber, mineral, and water barons. Conservation was a matter of seeking the support of the people against the encroachment of the powerful few. If one could describe in photographs how much like Eden was Yosemite Valley the electorate would presumably save it from its exploiters. It was not foreseen that the people, having saved it , would consider it their own, nor that a million pink-cheeked Boy scouts, greening teenage backpackers, and middle-aged sightseers might, with the best of intentions, destroy a wilderness as surely as the most rapacious of lumbermen, who did his damage quickly and left the land to recover if it could.
It has developed, in other words, that to photograph beautifully a choice vestigial remnant of natural landscape is not necessarily to do a great favor to its future. This problem is now understood, intuitively or otherwise, by many younger photographers of talent, who tend to make landscapes of motifs that have already been fully exploited and that have therefore nowhere to go but up. It is difficult today for an ambitious young photographer to photograph a pristine snowcapped mountain without including the parking lot in the foreground as a self-protecting note of irony.
In these terms Adams' pictures are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition. It is possible that Adams himself has come to sense this. The best of his later pictures have about them a nervous intensity that is almost shrill, a Bernini-like anxiety, the brilliance of a violin string stretched tight.
It does not seem likely that a photographer of the future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust, and belief that Adams has brough to it. If this is the case, his pictures are all the more precious, for that then stand as the last records, for the young and the future, of what they missed. For the aging -- for a little while -- they will be a souvenir of what was lost.
John Szarkowski"
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