Ansel Adams exhibit shows artist's expertise

Show will continue at AMAM through Oct. 18

One would expect Ansel Adams' landscape photographs to line the shop windows in tourist traps that surround national parks, not in a flat mid-western college town.

Seeing Adams' photographs displayed in downtown Oberlin storefronts, however, is exactly what prompted curator Stephan Jost to put together Ansel Adams and the Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photograph, currently on view at the Allen Memorial Art Museum.

Although he is known for his sweeping landscape photography, Adams' quest to document the western frontier has made him more popular historically than artistically. The show, which will run through Oct. 18, is extremely successful in conveying Adams' influence and expertise as an artist.

The exhibit links Adams to other well-known photographers such as Alfred Steiglitz, who crusaded to make photography a valid art form. Steiglitz displayed Adams' work in galleries alongside popular painters such as Georgia O'Keefe. It is obvious to see how Steiglitz became one of Adams' early proponents when one looks at Steiglitz's work, "A Bit of Venice." In this piece Stieglitz alters a Venice landscape into a highly balanced soft composition that appears similar to Adams' work aesthetic.

The show is also successful in conveying the large amount of craftsmanship and manual labor that went into Adams' photographic process. For certain photographs Adams and his peers were required to carry their heavy glass lenses through rocky terrain and develop the photographs on site. This aspect of Adams' work makes his breathtaking landscapes and their beautiful dark contrasts of grays and blacks even more admirable.

One particular photograph by Adams, "Noon Clouds," plays upon the polarity between a dark mountain range and a cluster of white powdery clouds. Through techniques such as high contrast of light and dark, Adams' landscape photographs tend to create an awareness of one's surroundings that would have otherwise been ignored.

Adams wrote in a letter to Cedric Wright, a fellow photographer featured in the AMAM exhibit: "[Art] is both the taking and giving of beauty; the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these."

Ansel Adams and the 19th-Century Landscape Photograph will be on display at the Allen Memorial Art Museum through October 18. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m.