Ansel Adams: The Black-and-White Master, in Color
Nov.08, 2009 in
Arts and Culture, Graphic Arts
Ansel Adams was the poet of the gray spectrum, the man who dipped the American sublime into the inkpot of black-and-white photography and by that means made it new again. So persuasive were his methods that because of him we tend to think of the national parks the way we think of the Great Depression, as something we can barely conceive of in color. He almost made us believe that the whole of creation comes in the palette of a cinder block — and to be glad about it.
Ansel Adams
(See 10 things you didn’t know about national parks.)
Adams is so identified with black and white that most people would be surprised to learn that he started to shoot in color soon after Kodachrome was invented in the mid-1930s and that by the time of his death in 1984 he had produced nearly 3,500 color images. Though he allowed some of those pictures to be published in his lifetime, he never printed them himself, or at least not for the public. He didn’t believe that the color processes of his day could produce results to compare with the rich visual deliberation, the fine-grained luxuriance of his work in black and white. To put it bluntly, he didn’t think he could control the outcome with color, and for Adams control over the artistic process meant everything. But he valued the richness of color transparencies, looked forward to the day when it would be possible to print them to his own high standards, and came close to producing a book about color theory and practice that would include some of his own work. (See TIME’s audio slideshow "The FSA and the Dawn of Kodachrome.")
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