Art as affirmation of life: Ansel Adams' photograph exhibit ar the Detroit Institue of Arts

By: Irena Janjic

Posted: 4/3/07

Figuring out how to best develop 4Ps for a new product, stomping the men in ice hockey, and simply happy hour-ing way too much, I forgot how neglected the right side of my brain has been lately. I visited the Detroit Institute of Arts this past weekend and let the imaginative yet authentic aura of Ansel Adams' photographs alleviate my analytics-and-socializing-preoccupation.

If art is affirmation of life, as Adams' suggests, I had been considerably dormant for a while and was in dire need of awakening, even if only for a day. The "American images captured by an American master" exhibit was comprised of 4 or 5 small rooms and nooks adorned with Adams' photographs, that can be perused in just a few minutes, even at a casual pace. However, most visitors including me, dove into each photo before us and let the audio tour take us through the historic development of each shot. After examining the poignant black and white landscape portraits by America's best-known and most famous photographer, the crowd slowly dissipated and I was left alone with each photograph, to study the complex shades and moods; my afternoon was joyfully taken over by the soft-focus luminescence.

The exhibit covered Adams' entire career in a hundred or so photographs, from the 20's to the 70's, illustrating his unrelenting love for nature and his talent for transforming pictorial landscapes into expressive pieces of artist.

Ever since his first family vacation to Yosemite in 1916 and shortly after joining the Sierra Club, Adams became a student of everything wilderness-related; whether it was a National Park, the Sierra Nevada or the Canadian Rockies, he learned about mountain shadows, tree bark textures, and curvatures of valleys and peaks. Through my eyes, his photographs illustrated a passion for nature and reminded me of the inherent beauty in our world. In his words, "I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us."

Once an aspiring concert pianist, Adams musical aptitude is manifest in many of his photos. He used a metronome to pace his shutter activities and music as an inspiration for shadow play and dramatic light exposure in his photographs. Music also brought discipline and structure to his approach to photography, in my mind most evident in the Rose and Driftwood photograph that used the smallest setting of camera lens opening to create rich tones and textures of a flower and driftwood bark.

Adams usually labored for eighteen hours or more per day to capture wilderness he visited throughout his numerous trips, but once in a while he also photographed people in his life to create memories and express emotions. The photographs of Georgia O' Keeffe and Orville Cox, in particular, caught my eye. The photo speaks to me about the beauty of Canyon de Chelly (de Shay) and beyond. Adams' friend and the canyon guide exude mischievous delight on a brisk afternoon, spending time with each other exploring nature. Years after capturing that moment, Adam's wrote: "This photograph recalls for me the brilliant afternoon light and the gentle wind rising from the canyon below. I remember that we watched a group of Navajos riding their horses westward along the wash edge, and we could occasionally hear their singing and the echoes from the opposite cliffs."

Though the inspirational legacy of Adams ' art will always be his powerful historic significance as an environmentalist and nature activist, I walked away from the exhibit most touched by his San Francisco photograph. A native of San Francisco, he captured the Golden Gate in 1932 before the bridge made it famous and for me, a former resident of the Bay Area, his photo brought back memories of carefree moments spent under those impossible skies. And that's just it…his images will inevitably remain not only the veritable icons of wild America, but also an intimate experience reflected in each viewer's imagination.