Ansel Adams in Our Time

Ron Rothbart

I'm an amateur photographer living in the San Francisco Bay area. For awhile, I was very much into minimalist long-exposure photography. I must have photographed every piling, pier, and bridge in San Francisco Bay. These days I'm into natural landscapes. For me, going out to photograph is always something of an adventure. Even if I have a plan, I never know what I'm going to find. The experience of the shoot is as important to me as the result.

ronrothbart.myportfolio.com

Last year, I went to an exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco that purported to be about “Ansel Adams in Our Time.” The exhibit struck me as odd and disappointing. Along with Adams’ own work, we were presented with work that supposedly represented Adams’ “legacy.” While Adams is known for his inspirational photographs of natural beauty, these were photographs of environmental degradation: a burnt forest, tourists in a Yosemite parking lot, and a spy satellite over the wilderness. One photo in particular struck me as rather lame: a very blurry picture of a waterfall in Yosemite. I’m pretty familiar with contemporary nature and landscape photography, and I know that there are some fantastic photographs of waterfalls “in our time.” So I wondered why the curators had chosen pieces like this, so discordant with Adams’ aesthetic. Then I ran across the following in a review of the exhibit: “Some have complained that the exhibit focused too much on modern conceptual photographers rather than more familiar landscape photographers such as Galen Rowell or Eliot Porter” (Stinson, p. 4). Count me as one of these complainers.

In what follows, I’ll explore what I think Adams was trying to do, what he thought about art, and why his legacy was represented by conceptual photography in the exhibit (which was not only at the DeYoung but at a number of museums across the country). Finally, I’ll conclude by mentioning some photographers whose work I think better represents Ansel Adams in our time.