Aspens, Northern New Mexico is a black and white photograph by American photographer Ansel Adams, taken in 1958. [1]
Adams took the picture while driving back from a trip to Canyon de Chelly, in Arizona, with his wife, Virginia, and two assistant photographers, Gerry Sharpe and Don Worth, in the Autumn of 1958. His attention was suddenly caught by a grove of aspens, in New Mexico, in particular by their golden leaves. He quickly decided to stop and photograph the scene. He explained: “We were in the shadow of the mountains [north of Santa Fe], the light was cool and quiet and no wind was stirring. The aspen trunks were slightly greenish and the leaves were a vibrant yellow. The forest floor was covered with a tangle of russet shrubs. It was very quiet.” [2] [1]
Adams considered taking a picture in color, but he decided to do it in black and white, his favourite medium, which allowed him to enhance the contrast between the forest shadows and the tree's leaves. Adams said that "The majority of viewers of the horizontal image think it was a sunlit scene. When I explain that it represented diffused lighting from the sky and also reflected light from distant clouds, some rejoin, “Then why does it look the way it does?” Such questions remind me that many viewers expect a photograph to be the literal simulation of reality; of course, many others are capable of response to an image without concern for the physical realities of the subject." [3] [4]
A print of the photograph sold by $439,500 at Christie's New York, on 6 April 2017. [5]
There are prints of the photograph, among other public collections, at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, the National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., the Princeton University Art Museum, in Princeton, and the Museum of Fine Arts, in Houston. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
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John Sexton is an American fine art photographer who specializes in black and white traditional analog photography.
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Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is a black-and-white photograph taken by Ansel Adams, late in the afternoon on November 1, 1941, from a shoulder of highway US 84 / US 285 in the unincorporated community of Hernandez, New Mexico. The photograph shows the Moon rising in a dominating black sky above a collection of modest dwellings, a church and a cross-filled graveyard, with snow-covered mountains in the background. Adams captured a single image, with the sunset lighting the white crosses and buildings. Because Adams did not date the image, attempts have been made to determine a date from astronomical information in the photograph. It is one of Adams' most popular works.
Taos Pueblo is a book by Ansel Adams and Mary Hunter Austin. Originally published in 1930, it is the first book of Adams' photographs. A seminal work in his career, it marks the beginning of a transition from his earlier pictorialist style to his signature sharp-focused images of the Western landscape. It has been described as "an astonishingly poignant…masterpiece" and "the greatest pictorial representation of the American West."
Dody Weston Thompson was a 20th-century American photographer and chronicler of the history and craft of photography. She learned the art in 1947 and developed her own expression of “straight” or realistic photography, the style that emerged in Northern California in the 1930s. Dody worked closely with contemporary icons Edward Weston, Brett Weston and Ansel Adams during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, with additional collaboration with Brett Weston in the 1980s.
Ray McSavaney was an American fine-art photographer based in Los Angeles, California. Throughout a spartan but active life, practicing classical Western black and white fine art photography, he made enduring photographs of buildings, bridges, and street scenes of the vast city, ancient ruins and panoramic vistas of the Southwest, and studio setups with varied floral subjects. He died from lymphoma in Los Angeles Veteran's Hospital. Warm tributes to his life and career by some of his close friends and colleagues appear in a ‘celebration of life’ memorial recounted in ‘View Camera’ magazine.
Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California is a black and white photograph taken by Ansel Adams in 1927 that depicts the western face of Half Dome in Yosemite, California. In the foreground of the photo, viewers are able to see the texture and detail of the rock as well as the background landscape of pine trees and the Tenaya Peak. Monolith was used by the Sierra Club as a visual aid for the environmental movement, and was the first photograph Adams made that was based on feelings, a concept he would come to define as visualization and prompt him to create the Zone System. The image stands as a testament to the intense relationship Adams had with the landscape of Yosemite, as his career was largely marked by photographing the park. Monolith has also physically endured the test of time as the original glass plate negative is still intact and printable. The photograph is a part of the portfolio Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, released in 1927.
Rebecca A. “Becky” Senf is an American writer, and curator working in the field of photography. She is the Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP). She joined the CCP as Norton Family Assistant Curator in 2007, which was a joint appointment with Phoenix Art Museum, and was promoted to Chief Curator in 2016.
Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park is a black-and-white photograph taken by Ansel Adams in 1921. It is one of the photographs that he took at the beginning of his career, when he was following pictorialism, a style inspired by painting, that he soon would abandon for a more realistic approach to photography. This photograph with the title A Grove of Tamarack Pine was included in his Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras portfolio, published in 1927, and its also known by that name.
Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California is a black and white photograph taken by American photographer Ansel Adams, in 1944. It depicts the Sierra Nevada, as seen from Lone Pine, in California.