What a wonderful world

America is obsessed with its landscape. In a world infested with
mini-malls, Palm Pilots and SCUD missiles, sometimes people need a
respite with something natural, simpler, black and white.

Ansel Adams, America’s seminal photographer, managed to
fill his lens with a raw splendor of uninhabited wilderness,
providing the world with an intimate depiction of American
landscape. Now through May 11, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
is celebrating the centennial of the birth of this naturalist
photographer with the exhibit “Ansel Adams at 100,”
displaying over 100 of his works. The exhibition does not aim to
“construct a new Adams,” but reconstruct the history
that surrounds the artist with a greater accuracy.

Adams was born in 1902, in the wake of rapid industrialization
in the United States. Living and working until 1985, he experienced
the country’s wars, modernization of American life and
urbanization of America’s land, and provided a pictorial
redefinition of the oft-forgotten natural world. Today, in our
highly digitalized society on the brink of war, his work is as
timely as ever, perhaps more.

“Adams’ images are in our consciousness.
They’re on posters, they’re on calendars, they’re
on books. Everywhere you can turn there’s Ansel Adams,”
said Robert A. Sobieszek, the curator of photography at LACMA.
“He not only defined American landscape, he showed us so
eloquently the magical spirituality of the uninhabited land ““
the grandeur of it, the lyricism of it, the epicness of
it.”

Adams and his camera capture a romanticized, raw, untouched
America, portraying its sunsets, raindrops gorged with sunlight,
snow-topped mountains and moonlit villages. His photographs give a
glimpse of natural moments that many have forgotten or never
known.

“This (natural world) still exists in our consciousness,
but there’s not a part of this globe that hasn’t been
affected by us as humans,” Sobieszek said. “To
contemplate nature as apart from us is getting progressively
harder, and Ansel helps us remember that.”

While the epic beauty is in the rocks, the mountains, deserts
and valleys, the spirituality is in Adams’ own relationship
with the natural world. The majesty that is depicted in works such
as “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome,” to the mystical
intricacy of a few blades of grass sparkling in the sunlight in
“Grass and Water, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National
Park,” his works hold a special relevance in a world filled
with religious tension.

“Ansel was not a (conventionally) religious man, but he
certainly did help us understand the emotional, the psychological,
and the spiritual possibilities … of the landscape,” said
John Szarkowski, guest curator of the exhibit, and friend of
Adams.

Yet all of his works are not depictions of romanticized beauty;
many are raw portrayals of the sublime. “Oak Tree
Snowstorm” is almost menacing. The sky is cloudy white and
the ground blanketed in snow. Trees in the background blend into
the great whiteness apart from one statuesque oak that tears
through the snow, branches outstretched like a foreboding specter.
It is that recognition of a natural world greater than us,
unaffected by us, that Adams sought to convey.

One work that Szarkowski chose to include in the exhibit stands
out as the subject matter is not nature, or at least not at first
glance. “Broad Street, New York City,” is a stark
photograph of the normally bustling road, yet there is not one car
or person in the scene. This portrayal of a quiet, vulnerable New
York takes such profound relevance to post-Sept. 11 America that
it’s almost as if Adams had foreseen the country’s
tragedy. Szarkowski notes that the work appears at first vastly
different from Adams’ works of nature, yet looking closer the
composition of the tall buildings as well as the stillness of the
mood parallels his photos of looming mountains and cliffs. The
analogous worlds of shadow and shape show Adams trying to merge
nature and culture into one.

“There is loneliness in (the photograph), maybe some
rejection in it,” Szarkowski said. “Contradictory
businesses can all be pressed into the same picture. (It’s
like) another unpeopled canyon, another unpeopled rock or
valley.”

Yet whatever contemporary significance we choose to read into
this iconic photographer’s work, his images of America as
majestic, fragile and frightening are immortalized as he relates
his experience to the rest of the world.

“We look at the photographs and they allow us in some way
to share in what is certainly his experience. That’s good for
us,” Szarkowski said.

LACMA is located at 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Call (323) 857-6000 or
visit www.lacma.org for more info.