The Grand Canyon and the Southwest
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
The Grand Canyon and the Southwest Details
About the Author In a career that spanned over five decades, Ansel Adams was at once America's foremost landscape photographer and one of its most respected environmental leaders. Andrea G. Stillman, who worked with Ansel Adams in the 1970s, edited many of the Adams books published since his death, most recently Ansel Adams California. Read more
Reviews
. . . or so I've realized after the past three years of looking at _The Grand Canyon and the Southwest_, a collection of black & white photographs by Ansel Adams (Little, Brown and Company, 2000). Photographs such as these--from surreal canyon-scapes to a single cactus in Arizona or a little Navajo/Dineh girl--show a mastery of craft and equipment. But, it's the eye and mind of a visionary artist (Ansel) that makes these photos possible. It makes sense that someone would take a photo of a girl in Canyon de Chelly in her traditional clothing, and it was intelligent to photograph Julian Martinez at San Ildefonso Pueblo, but it takes someone like Adams to have the photo turn out with a life beyond the day it was taken seventy or eighty years ago. Each photo here is an act of meditation, a gift of stillness and quiet being. It's always a spiritual pleasure to see "Tree and Clouds" near Tucson (1944), or "White House Ruin" in Canyon de Chelly, and "Moonrise, Hernandez" (1941).Perhaps, what puts this collect beyond the ordinary are the selected letters Ansel Adams wrote to family and friends while he was on his photography expeditions; a pleasure to read are notes and letters to his wife Virginia, to his parents, to Albert Bender, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. In 1936, he wrote to Patsy English, "In many ways the Carlsbad Caverns are symbolic of my life; beautiful and exquisite things that exist only in the light of the moment--the light that comes from the mind and the heart. . . . These things must be caught when they can--worked to perfection when they can" (105). There are also facsimiles of postcards and stationery, and a list of people he visited in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.This volume is edited by Andrea G. Stillman, and the Introduction is written by William A. Turnage, and makes an outstanding companion to the 90-minute American Experience PBS broadcast on Ansel Adams in 2002 (for which both Stillman and Turnage were interviewed).
