OCTOBER, 2002

LACMA HOSTS LANDMARK "ANSEL ADAMS AT 100" EXHIBITION

Official Centennial Exhibition Presents Critical Reevaluation of Renowned Photographer's Best Work

LACMA offers accompanying exhibition of contemporary landscape photography,
Landscape Photography After Ansel Adams: Selections from LACMA's Permanent Collection

Ansel Adams at 100
Exhibition Dates: February 2 through May 11, 2003

LOS ANGELES-The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will commemorate the centennial of the birth of photographer Ansel Adams (1902-1984) with Ansel Adams at 100, on view at LACMA from February 2 through May 11, 2003. Although his work has been more widely exhibited than perhaps any artist in the 20th century, Adams' oeuvre has not been fundamentally reevaluated since his death in 1984. Organized at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by guest curator John Szarkowski, director emeritus of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Ansel Adams at 100 presents an aesthetic reappraisal of Ansel Adams as an artist and working photographer by bringing together more than 100 of Adams' finest photographs, including exemplary prints drawn from both public and private collections. According to Szarkowski, "Ansel Adams was one of the great photographers of this century. He was also one of the best-loved spokesmen for the obligations we owe to the natural world. It has been easy to confuse the related but distinct achievements that earned him these twin honors. The subject of the exhibition and catalogue for his centennial year will be Adams the artist." 

The Iconic Ansel

Ansel Adams has become a monumental figure in popular culture. Yet, despite his creation of thousands of photographs and an immense range of publications, Adams' influence on the development of modern photography has ironically been obscured by his popularity. While Adams is widely recognized for such classic photographs as Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, 1927, and Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, this exhibition situates such icons within the context of an unexpected and unfamiliar body of photographs that affirms Adams' contribution to 20th-century art. Featured works include many rarely seen prints from Adams' early career, several of which are displayed alongside prints made from the same negative much later in the artist's life. Such contrasts shed light on Adams' evolution as an artist, illustrating how his aesthetic choices changed over time and how his work was affected by his emerging celebrity.

From a centenary vantage point, it is clear that one of Adams' primary accomplishments was to revise the public's thinking about landscape. As Szarkowski writes in the companion book, "Adams' pictures. demonstrate that even in the great theatrical diorama of Yosemite, the mountains are no more miraculous than a few blades of grass floating on good water. His pictures have enlarged our visceral knowledge of things that we do not understand." Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, "Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save. Ansel Adams' great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world." 

Robert Sobieszek, LACMA curator of photography, views Adams' contributions to photography as pivotal. "No American landscape photographer can be oblivious to the very high standard that he established for contemporary photography, a standard that fused both aesthetics and ethics," observes Sobieszek.

After Ansel: American Landscape Photography of Today

At LACMA, the exhibition Ansel Adams at 100 will be accompanied by an exhibition of contemporary landscape photographs from LACMA's permanent collection entitled Landscape Photography After Ansel Adams: Selections from LACMA's Permanent Collection. This exhibition, a coda to the larger Adams exhibition, will feature photographs by Adams' assistants, students, and fervent admirers. Others are by artists who attempt to go beyond the Adams style and redefine landscape aesthetics. Still others are by those who respectfully spoof Adams' style. The accompanying exhibition will be on view throughout the Ansel Adams at 100 exhibition's run at the museum, February 2 through May 11, 2003.

About Ansel

One of California's most famous citizens, Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902, where he lived for most of his life. As a youth he first photographed Yosemite Valley with a Kodak Brownie box camera, and Yosemite became the lifelong subject for which he is best known. In 1932 Adams helped found Group f/64, an affiliation of Bay Area artists-including Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston-committed to promoting photographic expression in a pure, modernist vein. In his later life, Adams became an important educator and proselytizer for the medium of photography, America's best-known environmentalist and advocate of the Sierra Club, and the author of numerous publications on photographic technique.

Landmark Catalogue Accompanies Exhibition

To mark the 100th anniversary of Adams' birth and coincide with the opening of the exhibition, Little, Brown and Company-the exclusive publisher of the work of Ansel Adams-has released Ansel Adams at 100. Written and edited by Szarkowski, this definitive volume on the artist and his work features prints that have been meticulously reproduced under the supervision of Richard Benson, a pivotal figure in recent advances in photographic production. Designed by the award-winning J. Abbott Miller of Pentagram Design, the oversize book is printed on specially made French paper and bound in natural linen cloth with a matching slipcase. It features 114 tritone and 23 duotone illustrations and a frameable reproduction print of an Adams photograph, and comes complete with facsimile signature. Ansel Adams at 100 is priced at $150. A paperback version of the catalogue will be available for $40. Both editions and related Adams publications will be available at LACMA in the Museum Stores and via the LACMA Online Store.

Ansel Adams at 100 at LACMA will be followed by its final presentation, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from July 9 to November 4, 2003.

Ansel Adams at 100 is made possible by Hewlett-Packard.

About LACMA
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the foremost encyclopedic art museum in the western United States. Only 37 years old as an independent institution, the museum has assembled a collection of approximately 100,000 works from around the world, spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present. Through its far-reaching collections and extensive public programming, the museum is both a resource to and a reflection of the many cultural communities and heritages in Southern California.

Admission to Ansel Adams at 100:  For ticket information click here

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Credit Line: 
This exhibition was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and made possible by Hewlett-Packard.

Organizing Curator: 
John Szarkowski, director emeritus of the Department of Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

LACMA Curator: 
Robert Sobieszek, curator of Photography, LACMA

 

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