词条 | Adams, Ansel |
释义 | Adams, Ansel American photographer Introduction born February 20, 1902, San Francisco, California, U.S. died April 22, 1984, Carmel, California ![]() Early life and work Adams was a hopeless, rebellious student, but, once his father bowed to the inevitable and removed him from school at age 12, he proved a remarkable autodidact. He became a serious and ambitious musician who was considered by qualified judges (including the musicologist and composer Henry Cowell) to be a highly gifted pianist. After he received his first camera in 1916, Adams also proved to be a talented photographer. Throughout the 1920s, when he worked as the custodian of the Sierra Club's lodge in Yosemite National Park, he created impressive landscape photographs. During this period he formed a powerful attachment—verging on devotion—to Yosemite Valley and to the High Sierra that guarded the valley on the east. It might be said that the most powerful and original work throughout his career came from the effort to discover an adequate visual expression for his near-mystical youthful experience of the Sierra. ![]() Maturity By 1935 Adams was famous in the photographic community, largely on the strength of a series of articles written for the popular photography press, especially Camera Craft. These articles were primarily technical in nature, and they brought a new clarity and rigour to the practical problems of photography. It was probably these articles that encouraged Studio Publications (London) to commission Adams to create Making a Photograph (1935), a guide to photographic technique illustrated primarily with his own photographs. This book was a remarkable success, partly because of the astonishing quality of its letterpress reproductions, which were printed separately from the text and tipped into the book page. These reproductions were so good that they were often mistaken for original (chemical) prints. ![]() The importance of Adams's work was recognized in 1936 by Alfred Stieglitz (Stieglitz, Alfred), who awarded him the first one-artist show by a new photographer in his gallery, An American Place, since he had first shown Paul Strand 20 years earlier. However, many of Adams's contemporaries thought that photographers—and even painters—should be making pictures that related more directly to the huge economic and political issues of the day. At the time, Dorothea Lange (Lange, Dorothea), Arthur Rothstein, and others were photographing the Dust Bowl and the plight of migrants; Margaret Bourke-White (Bourke-White, Margaret) was capturing Soviet Russia and great engineering projects; and Walker Evans (Evans, Walker) was recording the inscrutable—or at least ambiguous—face of America's built culture. To some critics, these projects seemed more of the moment than did Adams's impeccable photographs of remote mountain peaks in the High Sierra and of the lakes at their feet—so pure that they were almost sterile. Not until a generation later did it come to be widely understood that a concern for the character and health of the natural landscape was in fact a social priority of the highest order. Adams increasingly used his prominent position in the field to increase the public acceptance of photography as a fine art. In 1940 he helped found the first curatorial department devoted to photography as an art form at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1946 he established at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco the first academic department to teach photography as a profession. He also revived the idea of the original (chemical) photographic print as an artifact, something that might be sold as an art object. His Portfolio I of 1948 offered 12 original prints of extraordinary quality for $100. Eventually, Adams produced seven such portfolios, the last in 1976. Interestingly, in contrast to this work on behalf of the photographic print, Adams also became directly involved, and was often a motivator, in advances in photomechanical reproduction. Throughout the 1940s he continued to explore the technical possibilities of photography in this and other ways. In the early part of the decade he codified the technical principles that he had long practiced into a pedagogical system he called the “zone system,” which rationalized the relationship among exposure, development, and resulting densities in the photographic negative. The purpose of the system was ultimately not technical but rather expressive: it was a tool to aid in visualizing a finished photograph before the exposure was made. The first edition of his often-reprinted book The Negative was published in 1948; written for photographers and not the general reader, the book expresses Adams's technical and aesthetic views in an uncompromising manner. Later career Most of Adams's great work as a photographer was completed by 1950: only a handful of important pictures were made during the last half of his adult life. Rather, in his later life, he spent most of his energy as a photographer on reinterpreting his earlier work and on editing books of his own work (often with his frequent collaborator, Nancy Newhall). An ardent conservationist (conservation) since adolescence, from 1934 to 1971 Adams served as a director of the Sierra Club. (Later, in the 1980s, he explicitly and forcefully attacked the environmental policies of the very popular President Ronald Reagan and his secretary of the interior, James Watt.) Many of the books Adams generated in his later career were concerned not only with the art of photography but also with the goal of raising awareness for the campaign to preserve the natural landscape and the life it supported. The most notable of these was This Is the American Earth (1960; with Newhall), published by the Sierra Club. It was one of the essential books in the reawakening of the conservation movement of the 1960s and '70s, along with Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949) and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). Other major titles by Adams include My Camera in the National Parks (1950) and Photographs of the Southwest (1976). The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (1977) reproduced the 90 prints that Adams first published (between 1948 and 1976) as seven portfolios of original prints. The results can thus be trusted to represent a selection from what the photographer considered his best work. In 1980 Adams was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter. Acknowledging Adams's years of work as both a photographer and an environmentalist, the president's citation said, “It is through 【Adams's】 foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans.” Additional Reading Important sources on the artist include Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman (eds.), Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916–1984 (1988), which reveals a lively sense of his personality and character; and John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at 100 (2001), a reappraisal of the photographer's achievement on the occasion of his centennial. The reproductions in this book are exceptional, even by the high standards associated with Adams's work. |
随便看 |
|
百科全书收录100133条中英文百科知识,基本涵盖了大多数领域的百科知识,是一部内容开放、自由的电子版百科全书。