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." [1] [2]
In the spring of 1929 Adams and his wife traveled to New Mexico to photograph the landscape there and to visit with friends. In Santa Fe, New Mexico they spent almost two months with writer Mary Hunter Austin, and within a short time Adams and Austin agreed that they should collaborate on a book about the area around Santa Fe. Austin introduced Adams to her friend and Santa Fe arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, whose husband Tony Lujan (she spelled her last name differently from her husband) was a member of the Taos tribal council. Through Lujan's influence, Adams was given permission by the Taos Indians to photograph in and around the then relatively unknown Taos Pueblo. [3]
After taking some initial photographs, Adams contacted his friend and patron Albert M. Bender, who had previously produced Adams' first portfolio of prints Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras . Bender enthusiastically agreed to sponsor a book based on this new work, and he contacted his friends at the Grabhorn Press to produce it. Adams and Austin continued to work independently on their respective parts of the book; they did not see each other's work until the book was ready to print. [4] Adams said he picked the final selection of images to match Austin's prose, and in part because of this her text is said to have "mirrored the sturdy repetitions of the pueblo architecture" [4] as seen in many of the photographs.
In spite of the book's title one of Adams' signature images from the book was taken at San Francisco de Asis Mission Church, which is not part of the pueblo itself but is located several miles away. He was captivated by the massive walls and buttresses of the church, saying they "seem an outcropping of the earth rather than merely an object constructed upon it." [4] At the same time, the church was an embodiment of the ongoing cultural conflicts in the area between the Indian and Hispanic cultures; it was a Catholic church built in Indian style and represented how the Taos Indians' survival was achieved in part through cultural adaptation by necessity.
Although it was published in book form, Taos Pueblo was illustrated with true photographic prints hand-produced by Adams. Adams insisted that the book have a consistent appearance throughout, and to meet his high standards a special paper was created that was used for both the text and the photographs. To do this he enlisted the help of Will Dassonville, a friend and producer of photographic papers in the Bay Area. Dassonville ordered a warm-colored, rag-base paper from a New England mill, then divided the order into two batches. The first went to the Grabhorn Press for the text pages, and the second was custom-coated by Dassonville with a silver-bromide emulsion. Adams was able to print directly on the latter paper, which had an exceptional tonal range and a matte surface, and develop it in his darkroom. Over a period of several months during the fall of 1929, Adams personally made nearly 1,300 prints for the book edition. [3]
The book was published by in a limited edition of 100 signed and numbered copies, plus eight artist's copies, each containing twelve original prints. The folio was hand bound in quarter tan morocco leather over orange buckram by Hazel Dreis. [5] Bender set the price of the book at $75 per copy, which was a very high figure during the Great Depression when the average annual income for an American family was about $1,300. [6] Bender, however, reached out to his wealthy friends, and within two years the edition was sold out. [3] Bender quipped: "I note the Stock Market reports only Ansel Adams photographs as the sole commodity that is on the rise." [7]
With the cooperation of Adams, in 1977 the New York Graphic Society published a facsimile edition of the original, using gravure prints rather than original photographs. It was produced in a limited edition of 950 copies, each signed by Adams. In the afterword to that edition, photographic historian Weston Naef wrote:
With Taos Pueblo we see a commitment to light and form as the essential building blocks of a picture. Every exposure was made in the most brilliant sunshine which in turn created deep shadows. Sunlight and shadow are at the same time the photographer’s friend and foe. Neither films nor papers can record the two extremes of bright sun and deep shadow equally well, and an unhappy tonal compromise is often the result. Rich shadow detail is here realized simultaneously with delicate highlights in a way that proves Adams’ native sense for the toughest technical problems of the medium, and how to solve them.” [8]
In September, 2011, a copy of the original 1930 edition was offered for sale for $85,000. [2] In 2014, rare book dealers were offering available original copies for $65,000 and $75,000 and between about $900 and $3,000 for the 1977 facsimile edition. [9]
The Taos art colony was an art colony founded in Taos, New Mexico, by artists attracted by the culture of the Taos Pueblo and northern New Mexico. The history of Hispanic craftsmanship in furniture, tin work, and other mediums also played a role in creating a multicultural tradition of art in the area.
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.
Dodging and burning are terms used in photography for a technique used during the printing process to manipulate the exposure of select areas on a photographic print, deviating from the rest of the image's exposure. In a darkroom print from a film negative, dodging decreases the exposure for areas of the print that the photographer wishes to be lighter, while burning increases the exposure to areas of the print that should be darker.
Mary Hunter Austin was an American writer. One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her classic The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the fauna, flora, and people of the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of southern California.
Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan was an American patron of the arts, who was particularly associated with the Taos art colony.
Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans is a book by Ansel Adams containing photographs from his 1943–1944 visit to the internment camp then named Manzanar War Relocation Center in Owens Valley, Inyo County, California. The book was published in 1944 by U.S. Camera in New York.
John Sexton is an American fine art photographer who specializes in black and white traditional analog photography.
The New Mexico Museum of Art is an art museum in Santa Fe governed by the state of New Mexico. It is one of four state-run museums in Santa Fe that are part of the Museum of New Mexico. It is located at 107 West Palace Avenue, one block off the historic Santa Fe Plaza. It was given its current name in 2007, having previously been referred to as The Museum of Fine Arts.
Sonya Noskowiak was a 20th-century German-American photographer and member of the San Francisco photography collective Group f/64 that included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She is considered an important figure in one of the great photographic movements of the twentieth century. Throughout her career, Noskowiak photographed landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Her most well-known, though unacknowledged, portraits are of the author John Steinbeck. In 1936, Noskowiak was awarded a prize at the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She was also represented in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Scenes from San Francisco” exhibit in 1939. Ten years before her death, Noskowiak's work was included in a WPA exhibition at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California.
Albert Maurice Bender was a German-Irish-American art collector who was one of the leading patrons of the arts in San Francisco in the 1920s and 1930s. He played a key role in the early career of Ansel Adams and was one of Diego Rivera's first American patrons. By providing financial assistance to artists, writers, and institutions, he had a significant impact on the cultural development of the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
Walter Landon Chappell was an American photographer and poet, primarily known for his black and white photography of landscapes, nature, and the human body.
George Cedric Wright was an American violinist and a wilderness photographer of the High Sierra. He was Ansel Adams's mentor and best friend for decades, and accompanied Adams when three of his most famous photographs were taken. He was a longtime participant in the annual wilderness High Trips sponsored by the Sierra Club.
Morley Baer, an American photographer and teacher, was born in Toledo, Ohio. Baer was head of the photography department at the San Francisco Art Institute, and known for his photographs of San Francisco's "Painted Ladies" Victorian houses, California buildings, landscape and seascapes.
Albert Looking Elk, also known as Albert Martinez was a Taos Pueblo painter. Looking Elk is one of the three Taos Pueblo Painters.
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.
Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras is a portfolio of 18 silver gelatin photographic prints made by Ansel Adams in 1927. It was the first publication of a portfolio of his prints, produced not long after he decided to become a professional photographer, and has since been called "a landmark work in twentieth-century photography."
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.
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.
Carl Everton Moon was an American photographer, book and magazine illustrator, painter and writer focused on Native American subjects. He has been called "the imitator of Edward Curtis" and "the last of the great early photographers to go west".
Media related to Taos Pueblo as photographed by Ansel Adams at Wikimedia Commons