Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California is a black and white photograph taken by Ansel Adams, c. 1937. It is part of a series of natural landscapes photographs that Adams took from Inspiration Point, at Yosemite Valley, since the 1930s.
This became the most famous photograph taken by Adams at the Yosemite National Park, depicting several natural landmarks visible from that view point, namely El Capitan, Bridalveil Falls, Cathedral Rocks, and Half Dome, seen at the left, all of which also appear in other of his pictures. Some of his early photographs depict that landscape at Summer, but this one was clearly taken in Winter. The moment when a snow storm is clearing, allowing the view of the majestic landscape of Yosemite Valley, with their references and the vegetation visible, still covered with some snow, made this one of his most memorable photographs. [1]
Adams stated that “While living in Yosemite I had great opportunity to follow the light and the storms, hoping always to encounter exciting situations. There were hundreds of spectacular weather events over the years, but the opportunities to photograph them were limited by accidents of time and place...” [2] Adams took the picture on a December, possibly in 1937, just as a rain turned snow storm was beginning to clear away. He explained that his viewpoint had been motivated in part by the landscape: "At this location one cannot move more than a hundred feet or so to the left without reaching the edge of the almost perpendicular cliffs above the Merced River. Moving the same distance to the right would interpose a screen of trees or require an impractical position on the road. Moving forward would invite disaster on a very steep slope falling to the east". [3]
There has been controversy over the time when the photograph was taken, since Adams gave conflicting information. In his book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (1983), he claims that it was taken in 1940. In his following book, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (1984), he states it was from 1944. This date was accepted until an early print with the date of 1938 was sold at Sotheby's in 2005. Mary Stuar Alinder suggested the date of December 1935, in accordance with the investigation of Donald W. Olson. [4]
A mural-sized print of the photograph sold by $722,500 at Sotheby's New York, in June 2010, making it then the highest price reached by an Ansel Adams photograph. [5]
There are prints of the photograph in several public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, and the Toledo Museum of Art. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]
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.
Albert Bierstadt was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.
Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916) was an American photographer of the 19th century. Born in New York, he moved to California and quickly became interested in photography. He focused mainly on landscape photography, and Yosemite Valley was a favorite subject of his. His photographs of the valley significantly influenced the United States Congress' decision to preserve it as a National Park.
Thaddeus John Szarkowski was an American photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Frederick Sommer, was an artist born in Angri, Italy and raised in Brazil. He earned a M.A. degree in Landscape Architecture (1927) from Cornell University where he met Frances Elizabeth Watson (1904–1999) whom he married in 1928; they had no children. The Sommers moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1931 and then Prescott, Arizona in 1935. Sommer became a naturalized citizen of the United States on November 18, 1939.
Judith Rose Dater is an American photographer and feminist. She is celebrated for her 1974 photograph, Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite, featuring an elderly Imogen Cunningham, one of America's first woman photographers, encountering a nymph in the woods of Yosemite. The nymph is the model Twinka Thiebaud. The photo was published in Life magazine in its 1976 issue about the first 200 years of American women. Her photographs, such as her Self-Portraiture sequence, were also exhibited in the Getty Museum.
Twinka Thiebaud is an American model who has posed for many of the most important photographers of the 20th century.
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.
Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite is a 1974 photograph by Judy Dater. It depicts elderly photographer Imogen Cunningham, encountering nude model Twinka Thiebaud behind a tree in Yosemite National Park. It is considered Dater's most popular photograph and according to the photographer, was inspired by Thomas Hart Benton's painting Persephone, which portrays a voyeur observing a nude woman reclining against a tree, who had been bathing in a stream.
Rondal Partridge was an American photographer. After working as an assistant to well-known photographers Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams in his youth, he went on to a long career as a photographer and filmmaker.
Margaret Woodward Weston, known as "Maggi", is an American photography collector and promoter who started one of the first commercial art galleries in the United States devoted solely to photography.
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.
Neil Folberg is an American-Israeli photographer and gallerist.
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.
The Polaroid Collection was a collection of fine-art photographs assembled by the Polaroid Corporation. The collection was initiated in the 1940s by Ansel Adams and Edwin Land. Following the company's 2008 bankruptcy, the collection was broken up for sale in 2010.
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.
The Tetons and the Snake River is a black and white photograph taken by Ansel Adams in 1942, at the Grand Teton National Park, in Wyoming. It is one of his best known and most critically acclaimed photographs.
Aspens, Northern New Mexico is a black and white photograph by American photographer Ansel Adams, taken in 1958.
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.