Ansel Adams Poster

Not one at the time who was all that into “nature,” I was still riveted the first time I saw an Ansel Adams poster. It was a collection of trees.  It was in brown hues, colors and tones recalling the old tintype photographs.  It was, it turned out, titled “Redwoods, Bull Flat Creek, California” (1960).  And it called to, lured me in, for the very first place I lived after leaving home as a teen was Mill Valley California, where the on the path to the town library are magnanimous redwoods that look just like those in the Ansel Adams poster.  Well, I have that backward, don’t I?  The Ansel Adams poster redwoods look just like the redwoods on Blithedale Avenue.  Yes, of course they should, as the poster is a photograph, you might say.  But the photograph is more.  Ansel Adams photography is so astute, so remarkably pure, that his eye pulls the magic and mysticism out of the lines and edges, the lights and darks of the actual natural thing.

The Ansel Adams poster, that is, borders on the fantastic.  And keep in mind this is before photo manipulation, before MS Paint programs and Photoshop, etc. al..  Consider, for example, Adams’s “Afternoon Sun, Crater National Park, Oregon” (1943/1950).  The wind moves that water, is so dimensionally apt that if you stare at the shot just right, you might swear the wind is blowing in the room where you are viewing the Ansel Adams poster.

Or consider “Mt. Williamson, The Sierra Nevada, from Manazar, CA” (1945): the texture and depth of the hard rocks in the foreground contrasts strikingly with the fogged-in mountain range in the background…so that as you view the photograph, you temporarily suspend your awareness that the rocks in the front and those in the back are of the same stuff.

Or stop long enough (even if you are not a nature freak) to contemplate his “Frozen Lake and Cliffs” (1932/1934):  the foreground water seems distinctly separate from the bordering snow, as if the fourth dimension could be accessed in the interstice between black mirage of water and white static snow.  And that focus is just one smaller segment of the work, so you could study the piece for longer, finding many more nuances and subtleties than I will cover here.

Since arriving in California, I have (obviously) grown older.  It has been twenty-nine years since I visited those redwoods, for instance.  But I have also grown more appreciative of trees, nature, and the world beyond our concrete and paint.  For the most part, I have done so by way of Ansel Adams poster number one, two, three, and other spectacular photography that assists me in looking deeper and longer into the awe that is nature and art combined.