Ansel Adams in Color
As a new book shows, not everything in the photographer's philosophy was black and white
- By Richard B. Woodward
- Smithsonian magazine, November 2009, Subscribe
(Page 2 of 2)
The images from the '40s and '50s in the new edition reveal how his approach to a subject changed (or didn't) according to the film he loaded in his camera. He had photographed the Ranchos de Taos church in New Mexico many times in austere black and white. (Taos Pueblo was the subject of his 1930 book collaboration with writer Mary Austin.) But his 1948 color photograph of the building at sunset rendered the adobe walls and the sky behind as if in throbbing slabs of pastel crayon.
This expressionist approach to color differs markedly from the nearly monochrome view of Mono Lake in California, from 1947, which is similar to many of his studies of clouds mirrored in water. In a class of its own is his view of Utah's Monument Valley circa 1950, in which he captured the warmth of the sun on the dusty sandstone amid long shadows. The photograph is more about transience, atmosphere and time immemorial than bands of color, and it's one of the finest color pictures he ever made.
Adams thought enough of some of his color photographs to exhibit a selection of prints from his transparencies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1950. The fifth volume in his magisterial series on photographic techniques was to be devoted to color, but he died before getting to it.
Critical acclaim for the color photographers who came of age in the 1970s baffled Adams (and, to be fair, many others). He thought it was outrageous that the Museum of Modern Art gave William Eggleston a solo exhibition in 1976. Eggleston's generation certainly benefited from advances in film sensitivity, but younger photographers also composed in color with an ease unknown to Adams. The subjects they gravitated toward—suburban anomie, roadside trash—were equally foreign to him.
"I can get—for me—a far greater sense of ‘color' through a well-planned and executed black-and-white image than I have ever achieved with color photography," he wrote in 1967. For Adams, who could translate sunlight's blinding spectrum into binary code perhaps more acutely than anyone before or since, there was an "infinite scale of values" in monochrome. Color was mere reality, the lumpy world given for everyone to look at, before artists began the difficult and honorable job of trying to perfect it in shades of gray.
Richard B. Woodward is a New York City-based arts critic.
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Comments (13)
I have loved Ansel Adams since I was a little girl. Now that I am grown up my house is still decorated with his work. And although I am not your typical college student I believe it would be helpful to add citations to this page. Someone may want to use this material one day.
Posted by Carissa on April 10,2012 | 04:11 PM
Learning photography in the 1960s when I studied it in college meant learning Adams' zone system, using his books as texts. If only he had been able to finish that text on color that Woodward mentions! Since that text wasn't available, and printing color didn't work well yet (unless you could afford dye transfer), the smart students ended up shooting black and white large negatives AND Kodachrome. Print the B&W now, but some day maybe we could really print those Kodachromes. Because of the shape of the toe and the shoulder in the Kodachrome response curves, that film does capture the shadow and highlight details, much better than most digital cameras do (unless the latter use special techniques, which Adams would certainly have explained best!). That detail just doesn't show in the printing unless its processed in ways that were largely unavailable then, and which weren't needed for black and white film processed according to the methods in Adams' texts, which is why we have the impression that Kodachrome lacked that range.
Posted by Thomas Flagg on February 21,2010 | 08:33 AM
Growing up my father had a b/w Ansel Adams in his office. Every time I looked at that photo, I saw a new picture. There was always a detail, shadow, and overall presence that made me never grow tired of admiring his work.
Posted by Sarah Leyda on November 13,2009 | 09:38 AM
Before reading this article, I never realized how difficult color had been to capture. I take for granted the fact that color today is easy to obtain and everywhere! I love the fact the Adams strived to change the way things were and I am eager to read his new book.
Posted by Ashley on November 12,2009 | 10:50 PM
I had never seen any of Adams's color photographs until now, and I can only say I'm truly amazed at how well he had mastered all forms of film photography. He was truly one of those photographers who "just got it."
This article certainly has inspired me to look into more of his work. I had seen some of his B&W Landscapes, but never much of his urban art. His work never ceases to amaze me.
Posted by Stephen on November 12,2009 | 11:48 AM
Prior to reading this article I had never read Smithsonian Magazine nor had I heard of Ansel Adams. This article was very informative about Mr. Adams as well being extremely well written, I now have an interest in both.
I really appreciate how thorough and informative the articles published in this magazine are, truly a great piece of literature.
Mr. Adams on the other hand is simply an amazing photographer. Both his B & W work and color portraits are truly inspiring.
Posted by Caleb on November 11,2009 | 10:13 PM
I met Mr. Adams at his home and workshop in the Carmel Highlands in about 1969, maybe '70. I was a student of one of his students (Al Weber).
I recall he showed us a color print, but he was modest about it and suggested it was the inevitable future of photography but he was clearly more in command of the subject when he talked about his work in black and white.
Around that time Wynn Bullock, one of Adams and Edward Weston's peers took to moving pieces of colored glass he picked up on the shore around on a lightboard, and he would photograph in color the "light paintings" as he called them.
When I saw him do it he was still experimenting with the process, and the results were not on a level with his mystical compositions in black and white.
Posted by Bob Divale on November 7,2009 | 05:57 PM
in comparing Adams's color work to his b/w it is easy to understand why he was so discouraged with the color medium. The photo"s shown here are not indicative of his skill and perception. in his b/w images you see full shadow detail , brilliant high lights with detail . in these color samples. the shadows are blocked , the highlights are washed out. the problem was that the color film in the past were very contrasty and the ability to get full range images was imposable with these materials, especially kodachrome. Kodachrome is notorious for it's blocked shadows . look at any national geographic magazine of that time and you will see this blocked shadows characteristic . the problem with nature photography is that you cannot control the light you have to work with. In b/w Adams could gain great control over the image because the b/w negative film was, and still is "adjustable" , to match the light"s contrast by adjusting the developing process in the dark room. In the color process ,both negative and positive {transparencies] involve three separate films , red, green, and blue, sandwiched together and processed all at the same time. any change in the process would have a different effect on each layer resulting in wild color distortions. there is the dye transfer process that uses three separate b/w negatives shot through red, green, and blue filters and then these can be processed in the same way as regular b/w then the negatives are registered in too one image. See the work of -Eliot Porter- Adams found the dye transfer to time consuming and the fact that if any thing moved during the three exposures the movement would be noticeable with a rainbow effect from the three different colors shot separately. who knows what Ansel Adams could of done with the advent of photoshop and the high dynamic range photography that we have to day.
Posted by dale on November 7,2009 | 01:35 PM
As a genius in the field of photography, Adams understood that the mechanical process of capturing color is very different from the interpretation that the human eye/brain connection makes. Were he alive today in the growing digital age, he would still be struggling with the difference. We can appreciate his mastery of light by converting some of our color photographs to black and white and see how lifeless many of them are, especially without digital manipulation. Every photographer should take the time to try this experiment to truly appreciate Ansel Adams.
Adams, the late Galen Rowell (unique vision and energy) and DeWitt Jones (inside the mind and soul of the photographer) are my guiding lights in shaping my photographic experience.
Posted by John G Schickler on November 6,2009 | 04:44 PM
As a new admirer of his work it is pleasurable to see articles and books still written by him. I think he was a genius and a very insightful photographer who viewed photography from a philosophical point of view.
Posted by Renise on November 2,2009 | 07:48 PM
Interesting to read this article after being friends with a photographer who, I believe, knew Adams, and who also spent years in his own color lab trying to establish, measure, and lock down the variables associated with Kodachrome development, looking at time, temperature, chemistry, etc., and attempting to make a viable, repeatable computer program that would yield a repeatable, predictable, consistent Kodachrome development process and result. It was a huge effort, but I understood that it never was sufficiently successful, and that, ultimately, there developed questions about the longevity of the truth of the color in Kodachrome images over time.
Posted by Robert Nuner on October 31,2009 | 06:49 PM
I have always adored Ansel Adams B&W photographs, having cut my teeth on them at art school in the 1980s. I understand his reluctance to use colour when the outcome was not completely controllable by him. Colour is an added element of design that needs such careful consideration in a composition. His colour photos shown here are quite beautiful, but aren't quite the quintessential Adams we know and love.
Posted by Suzanne Dewhurst on October 26,2009 | 10:04 PM
Although this picture is beautiful, I prefer Adams' black and white photos. There's such beauty in the starkness of them.
Posted by BetteLee Henry on October 21,2009 | 10:33 AM