Zooming In

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November 25, 2005

MFA Ansel Adams Assignment

The museum is cavernous but warm, active and alive. I feel like it’s a huge creature poised above and over me, its belly littered with the treasures it has swallowed over the eons. Inside the belly of the museum the world is shut out, forgotten. The air smells still and hangs – either just cool or warm enough to be felt as you move through it. Sounds echo as if across time as well as space, in some cases seeming to come from deep within the world caught on canvas. In the corner of my eye a statue stirs and a woman stops; granite rolls to life and flesh solidifies.

I bring my personal and societal assumptions about art as an entity, about museums, about the people in the museum (the staff and the patrons who frequent it), about the artist and artwork, subject matter, medium and the manner in which it is displayed. And of course I bring myself, so I bring my perception of self, which further affects how I perceive and interact with the things I mentioned above and more.

I believe that texture and light were important to Ansel Adams in Moonrise Hernandez, New Mexico (1941). He has used the fading light of day and the rising moon to heighten ones sense of the feel of the landscape through texture. The white headstones and crosses in the graveyard stand out in sharp contrast to the darkened landscape and seem connected to the white clouds and moon that stand out against the dark sky. I believe that by abstraction, Adams is using the symbolism of the headstones and crosses to represent our continued connectedness with the natural world, in life and beyond.

In Maynard Dixon (1945 about) the subject, of the same name, sits behind a screen, like that of a porch. The photograph was taken approximately a year before his death and I believe it was important to Ansel Adams that he capture the essence of both who Dixon was at the time and who he had been during his life as an artist. The sun was shining when Adams took the photograph and he uses this with the screen to create a superb effect – Dixon’s face is only visible behind the screen because it is in shadow, the screen itself visible where the sun hits it directly, therefore obscuring what is behind it. The result is that Dixon is portrayed, by what we can see of his face, as a strong man, a man who has seen many years and who has seen them as part of the natural world. However he is also – by what we can’t see behind the screen, bleached out by the sun’s rays – not completely visible to us as if not entirely present or of this world. This sense is heightened by the expression in his face. Whether Adams captured this purposefully – using this abstraction through light and screen because he knew Dixon was soon to die and already passing from this world or because he believed Dixon, a landscape artist in his own right, to be so connected to the earth that he was not entirely separate from it – we do not know. But the effect affects the mood of the photograph greatly and seems to speak an ethereal quality to its otherwise earthy, organic and unpretentious tone.

Ansel Adams was invited to a detention camp at Manzanar for Japanese Americans during the Second World War. He visited and took photographs of the Sierra Navada there between 1943 and 1945. In 1944 he took a photograph entitled Mount Williamson from Manzanar. Although this photograph is a landscape, I also think it serves as an abstract because of its subject matter and location. I don’t believe the two are in any way coincidental. The rocks in the foreground are, I believe, used in symbolic contrast to Mount Williamson in the background. Adams “believed the Japanese-Americans, a nature-loving people, must have been inspired and strengthened by the setting, which gave the people ‘a certain respite from their mood of isolation and concern for the future.’ Adams was impressed by the efforts of the inhabitants to make the camp more livable and functional by creating a Japanese garden, farms, schools, churches (Buddhist, Christian, and Shinto), a playground, and small industries.” (http://www.hctc.commnet.edu/artmuseum/anseladams/details/mtwilliamson.html, accessed on November 25, 2005). I believe that in this photograph Adams is capturing and highlighting by abstraction, the mood, not only of the natural formations but of the detainees in the camp. I think the photograph represents an amazing symbolism in the rocks of strength and fortitude notwithstanding that the large boulders are dwarfed by the massive mountain in front of which they are strewn but which is softened by a heavenly stream of light symbolizing, it would seem, some hope or cessation of harshness.

Wall Writing, Hornitos, California (1960 about) is fascinating. I believe the image challenges some of our assumptions and ideas about what art is. The image is of graffiti, the writing is layered and so the different names and marks interweave and link to form a pattern. The image appeals to me because I see it as the coincidental art of many different people. I see the whole in Adams’ photograph and can see how he used light, lens and film, framed the subject matter and developed the film in a way that captures the whole and makes it art. I can also see how each individual scrawl is a piece of art in itself and how together they form an artistic whole on a wall in Hornitos that without Adams’ capturing would still be art for those who observed it.

~ Nanette

Posted by lcissavides at November 25, 2005 05:14 PM

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Posted by: xmrwemr at June 20, 2008 12:27 PM

Posted by: xmrwemr at June 20, 2008 12:27 PM

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