ARTS
Photography
Ansel Adams (Barbican, till 19 July)
Pictorial virtues
Francis Hodgson
Three years after his death, Ansel Adams is in no obscurity. His prints are the most expensive, the most collected and among the most often reproduced on the market. There is an Ansel Adams Day, and a Mount Ansel Adams. No photo- grapher could be less in need of a major retrospective. But this exhibition is not just another display of Adams's immaculately crafted landscapes, although there are plenty of those in it. Peter Turner, who acted as curator, has chosen to teach as Well as display. What he offers us is the path Adams took to his eminence.
Ansel Adams combined in his mature style two quite separate tendencies in photography. He was a founder-member, In the Thirties, of Group f/64 and the aesthetic it represented. f/64 is the smallest aperture available on normal cameras, which gives, under average conditions, the greatest depth of field. Choosing f/64 implies that the photographer is looking for total clarity of vision, avoiding the emotive effects possible by softening focus. By picking it as their title, Group f/64 were making a statement of faith, a manifesto in favour of 'straight' photography in opposi- tion to what had gone before. What had gone before was Pictorialism. Born from the antagonism of photo- graphy's older cousins in the visual arts to the upstart technique, Pictorialism was the photographers' effort to prove that they too could use taste and choice and judg- ment in the pursuit of their kind of seeing. !t made much use of soft focus, as one way in which the photographer could exclude inessentials from the apparently all- devouring lens. The two styles could not be more differ- ent. The debate between them is not and now: when Adams started to photograph, in 1916, it was raging. What was in question was photography's very status. Was it to be an art-form on its own terms, or must it borrow from the stylistic man- nerisms of its rivals to achieve their legi- timacy?
Adams, as a photographer, was born a Pictorialist. The masters of his youth had been doing as much as possible to overlay the :objectivity' of the camera with a subjectivity' all their own. Steichen's great gum-bichromate prints, complete with the marks of the brush, stand as examples for many others. The accepted description of Adams's career is that he was a convert from Pictorialism, that the pictures of Paul Strand, in particular, persuaded him that photography need no longer be so insecure about its own qualities as to have to imitate painting or engraving. This exhibition offers an alternative explanation. Peter
Turner seems to be arguing that Adams remained a Pictorialist all his life.
Ansel Adams needed no prompting to discover that the landscape of his beloved West offered him its own artistry. Domin- ated by a sky so wild and full of activity that any painter addressing himself to it could only be assumed to exaggerate, it suited Adams's purposes. By giving him a Pictorialist light it liberated his 'straight' technique. Long after he had plumped for f/64 and clear sight, he was filling the top halves of his pictures with unmistakably painterly swirls of clouds. A surprisingly large proportion of his pictures are of the precise moment when the light was at its least stable: a break in a storm, winter sunlight, hazy mornings. Time and again, Adams came back to his early influences. The Pictorialist elements of his pictures, the shifting light and half-defined space, act as a counterbalance to the clinical precision of the rest.
This exhibition is the chronicle of that confrontation. It includes great photo- graphs that are unfamiliar, as well as familiar masterpieces. A handful of por- traits and some very European-looking pictures of glassware will give pause to those who think that Adams was only a technician of landscape photography. There is also much evidence of Adams the teacher. Many of the pictures here show the careful scrutiny he gave the photogra- phy that was taking place around him. There is for example, a delightful version of Paul Strand's famous White Fence. Adams's fence does not gleam; it is moss- grown and tumbledown, but it has lost none of its imperious presence.
Peter Turner has shown many photo- graphs twice, printed by different proces- ses. So we see Adams prepared to borrow rare techniques from book-making and etching to look for a particular effect. These early Dassonville prints and Parmel- lian prints are the ones in which his early Pictorialism is most apparent, later to be tempered but not abandoned. And we see `Fence, Half-Moon Bay', ca 1931, by Ansel Adams. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. very clearly the mastery in the darkroom which allowed Adams to make pictures with all the luxurious tonal range of plati- num prints in the more modest medium of silver prints.
Above all, we see Adams constantly thinking about his photography, ex- perimenting, tailoring technique to ex- pression. Adams needs no further canon- isation; it would have pleased him that an exhibition devoted to himself makes us look again at the Pictorialists and realise that they had, after all, their virtues. Adams knew it. So he turns out to be a great teacher of photography even after his death. Small wonder they named a moun- tain after him.
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