Ansel Adams: Beauty in Black and White

All through my life, I have taken photographs. In college, I was the one who could be counted on to record special moments—dancing in our dorm to “Saturday Night Fever,” playing football on Crane beach, jumping from a snow bank after the blizzard of ’78.

As a new mother, I took many photos of my infant daughter (more than I’d like to admit.) A good part of one album is filled with pretty much the same images of her smiling, laughing, eating—even sleeping. And though my picture-taking rituals became a little less ridiculous, I continued recording all those ‘firsts’ of my son, as well as the seconds and thirds. To this day, I take pictures of both special events and everyday slices of life. For me, it is a way to preserve the past, to capture moments in a way that lets me enter them again.

My interest and appreciation of photography and art lead me to the current Ansel Adams exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. While I have tried over the years to preserve memories, Adams was focused on creating them. And create them he did, one brilliant masterpiece after another.

Many of Adams’ photographs capture contrasts in ordinary scenes. In “Church and Fence,” shadows fall on straight slim pickets while wave-like impressions dance on the soil. The photograph is an intriguing mix of textures—smooth sky, rippled ground, wispy grass—in competing, but complementary angles. The effect is simple, stunning.

I am drawn to Adams’ photographs because, I too, appreciate the beauty of the ordinary—a solitary church on a hilltop, wind-swept dunes, bare and snow-covered trees. As focused as he was on simplicity, Adams also appreciated the majestic variations seen in nature—clear water juxtaposed with jagged mountains, rocky cliffs, blurry pines.

One of my favorite photographs is “Monolith—The Face of Half Dome” in Yosemite National Park. Shadows and light streak down the steep, ominous cliff as snow rests at the bottom. Adams described the photograph as a visualization that “captured the emotional impact of the scene rather than the way it actually looked.” Perhaps that is why his photographs are so powerful. Like all great works of art, we can’t help but be touched by them.

Though Adams often captured contrasts, he sometimes showed how we are connected to our surroundings. In one such photograph, an old man sits in a wooden chair, cane resting at his knee. The man is framed by a weathered wooden fence whose paint chips show the passage of time.

Some of Adams’ most spectacular pieces are the large Japanese screens covered in ferns, grass, pools and storms. And there are so many more breathtaking images—a delicate rose on driftwood, brightly lit aspens, a quiet moonrise, a single white cross leaning into a darkened sky.

Through his photographs, Ansel Adams revealed the splendor of the ordinary, the simple beauty of the majestic. This is one exhibition that is not to be missed. It is truly something to see.

(This column was originally published on townonline.com December, 2005)