Ansel Adams at 100 [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Ansel Adams at 100 celebrates the centenary of one of America's best-loved photographers. This superlative catalog of an exhibition organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presents the most dramatic and the most delicate of Adams's formal compositions, from spectacular mountainscapes to grasses on a pond, all reflecting his avowedly religious relationship to nature. Previously unpublished examples of Adams's early images show how he worked through the day, using changing light and different vantage points to interpret a subject. A fascinating comparison of his darkroom techniques is given in two printings of a 1948 negative of Mount McKinley, made in 1949 and 1978 to very different effects, one brooding and luminous, the other crisp and monumental. (The conventional wisdom is to prefer the earlier, but this reviewer loves them both.) The text by John Szarkowski, director emeritus of New York MoMA's photography department, gives biographical details and gracefully places Adams in the history of 20th-century photography and the conservation movement. Impeccable technical standards were a hallmark of Adams's work, and this book follows his tradition. Each black-and-white image is a tritone, meaning that it was printed from three different plates corresponding to different parts of the original photograph's gray scale, resulting in an extremely rich chromatic range. Light really does appear to glisten off a wet rock, and white aspens to glow. The images have been very carefully chosen, each page of a double spread complementing the other. The book's paper is custom-made, it is bound in linen and presented in a linen slipcase, and a complimentary facsimile of one of Adams's icons is included. The whole adds up to a most unusual and pleasing artifact: Ansel Adams at 100 consciously sets out to be the definitive study of a master, and it succeeds. --John Stevenson

"A book that's also art."

(The New York Times )

"Long after the museum tour of Ansel Adams at 100 ends, this book will endure as a vital document of his vast contribution to the art of landscape."

(San Diego Union Tribune )

"[Szarkowski's] incisive biographical essay and reproductions worthy of Adams' exacting standards make [the book] a fitting monument to an American visionary."

(Artnews )

"[Adams] probably did as much as any artist of the 20th century to shape the American psyche, to change our perception of the world...These pictures strive for classical purity, order, and finality."

(Washington Post )

Mit gottgleichem Blick schaute Ansel Adams auf die Natur und schuf Bilder mit Seele und Kraft.

Spektakuläre Bergketten und stille Bergseen, wilde Geysire oder Porträts einzelner Pflanzen - er schaffte es sogar, die Luft auf seinen Bildern sichtbar zu machen, und selbst tote Bäume scheinen zu leben und in den Nebel zu greifen. Es sind die bis heute unerreicht schönsten Landschaftsfotos. Adams majestätische Naturaufnahmen wurden zu Bildern aus dem kollektiven visuellen Gedächtnis einer ganzen Nation. Seine Schwarzweißbilder sind wie Gemälde, verzauberte Kommentare zur geheimnisvollen Schönheit der Natur. Landschaften, bei denen das Licht wie poliert erscheint und jeder Grashalm, jedes Sandkorn metallisch glänzt. Kompositionen aus Fels, Schnee und Himmel, die so aussehen wie Beethovens Neunte klingt, und doch einen Eindruck von Stille, Zeitlosigkeit und natürlicher Würde hinterlassen. Diese prachtvolle Sammlung der schönsten Bilder von Ansel Adams wurde von John Szarkowski, Leiter der fotografischen Abteilung des MoMA in New York, herausgegeben. Sie zeigt auf 200 Seiten 137 von Ansel Adams eindrucksvollsten Bildern. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

In a career that spanned more than five decades, Ansel Adams was at once America's foremost landscape photographer and one of its most ardent environmentalists.

John Szarkowski, is Director Emeritus of the Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. His book of photographs of the buildings of Louis Sullivan was recently reissued by Bulfinch Press. Szarkowski lives in East Chatham, NY, and New York City.