Ansel Adams exhibit story of beauty, challenge, preservation

May 30, 2023

The Figge Art Museum is preparing to present an Ansel Adams exhibit — Ansel Adams, 1902-1984: Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, 1940 Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. 76.577.35© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

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The Figge Art Museum is preparing to present an Ansel Adams exhibit that challenges the oft-quoted claim by America’s most famous and influential landscape photographer that “a photograph is usually looked at — seldom looked into.” The exhibit, which runs at the Davenport museum from June 17 to Aug 17, is titled Portfolio Three: “Ansel Adams, The Sierra Club, and the Making of a Landscape Icon,” and includes a suite of 16 images by the renowned photographer. Ansel Adams exhibit supporting sponsors are Eddie Brian and Caroline Pasierb. Contributing sponsors are Hunt and Diane Harris, Sears Seating, Carolyn Levine and Leonard Kallio Trust. The media sponsor is the Quad Cities Regional Business Journal. The photographs were printed in the 1950s and feature works from the 1930s through the 1950s. The pieces — which will be on display at the 225 W. Second Street museum — also are one of several series of photographs that reflect Mr. Adams' love of California's Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Club. The Figge exhibit’s aim is to encourage viewers to not only gaze at the images as Mr. Adams created them, but also to look more deeply into the mission behind them, said Andrew Wallace, the Figge’s director of exhibitions & collections. Mr. Adams was born in San Francisco before the massive 1906 earthquake. A young Ansel was first introduced to Yosemite in 1916 by his father, who also bought him the small Brownie camera that launched his photography career, Mr. Wallace told the QCBJ. He quickly developed a lifelong love of the park and became devoted to the grassroots Sierra Club, which still has its headquarters in Yosemite.

That group’s mission is apparent throughout Mr. Adams’ lifetime body of work, and Mr. Wallace said in the pieces that are part of the Figge exhibit. Featured photographs include 1937’s “Clearing the Winter Storm.” “For people who know Adams, that will be a highly recognizable image,” Mr. Wallace said. But photographs of grand vistas don’t encompass either the entire body of Mr. Adams’ work or the Figge’s Ansel Adams exhibit. “One of the things that happened during Adams’ lifetime as a professional photographer is that he started to think about different ways he could visualize aspects of the park, so he would take very intimate, small, close-up photographs in addition to these larger-format” images, Mr. Wallace said. “So you will see, for instance, a branch of a pine with snow on it, or foam on the water of a creek, or leaves, or sort of more up close and personal images.” He added: “What distinguished Adams from those people who appreciate his photography and want to emulate him is that he spent a lot of time in the park hiking” all around Yosemite. The park also is where he found his wife, Virginia Best, whose father owned an art studio on the park’s floor. It would eventually become the Ansel Adams Studio. “He met her there, this daughter of a painter, and so it’s kind of funny: He’s married to the park but he’s also married to a person whose history was also tied to the park,” Mr. Wallace told the QCBJ. Mr. Adams was among the vanguard of photographers who would elevate picture-taking to an art form, as well one of the artists whose mission was to promote and preserve America’s natural beauty. “The Sierra Nevada is a beautiful place, and it’s really iconic and striking in its beauty — unlike other places which may be beautiful but don’t have the same, kind of, whatever it is that Yosemite and the Sierras have,” Mr. Wallace said.

That beauty and Yosemite’s natural wonders were already being challenged before the advent of automobiles by visitors rushing to see newly created national parks in the late 1800s and early 1900s. “It’s funny because the globe has lots of beautiful places in it, but the American West — with its fraught history — nevertheless has some extraordinary landscapes. And those landscapes, in addition to them being the home for thousands of years of indigenous tribes and populations that sort of sustained them, also became sort of an icon for preservation of natural places.” Carlton Watkins was the first photographer to document Yosemite “in a big way,” Mr. Wallace added. He was quickly followed by painters eager to share its wonders. Yosemite soon became a destination for Americans from the East Coast and tourists from Europe. Mr. Carlton’s images helped persuade the U.S. government to establish Yellowstone National Park in 1890. “With that, of course, comes the onslaught of people wanting to visit it, and that places demands on the environment and that continues to this day,” Mr. Wallace said. These days, Yosemite continues to be one of the more visited parks in the nation. But unlike Yellowstone, which is spread out, Yosemite is located in a valley and is far more compact, he said. There, nature versus visitors is an even more difficult balance to maintain. The Figge Ansel Adams exhibition features a Roger Minick photo to help illustrate the point. For decades, Mr. Minick has photographed tourists in some of the most beautiful parts of the American West, said Mr. Wallace. Included in the Figge exhibit is a Minick photograph that features a woman wearing a Yosemite Park scarf with her back to the camera. She’s standing in what is now a parking lot created to view Inspiration Point. That parking lot was once the rocky promontory on which Mr. Adams climbed to photograph that spot. “So it’s a commentary of sorts on how nature has been caused to be appreciated in a way that is different from actually being there and absorbing the naturalness of it in a way that had been done in the prior century,” Mr. Wallace said. At its heart, of course, the traveling exhibit is a chance for Ansel Adams fans to get an intimate view of his works created from his own negatives exactly as the artist intended us to see them thanks to prints created from the artists’ own negatives. And just as importantly, Mr. Wallace told the QCBJ, it’s a reminder to “think about these beautiful places and keep them preserved but keep them accessible to everybody so they can be enjoyed.”

IF YOU GO – Ansel Adams Exhibit

Location: Figge Art Museum, 225 W. Second St., Davenport.
Dates: June 17-Aug. 17.
Hours: Tuesday- Wednesday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 5 p.m; closed Mondays.
Tickets: $10 for adults. Tickets can be purchased at figgeartmuseum.org or in person.
Entrance: Second Street Entrance off the Bechtel Plaza.
Check in at the Visitors Service desk.

Ansel Adams exhibit story of beauty, challenge, preservation

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IF YOU GO – Ansel Adams Exhibit

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