Ansel Adams : Photography from the mountains to the sea

Nice exhibition at the National Maritime Museum looking at the work of the American photographer Ansel Adams and featuring water as the subject in all forms, sea, river, snow, falls, ice, geysers and clouds.

Through various exhibitions I have been to recently I am getting interested in the early use of photography. The early Adams pictures show how by about 1910 photographic modernism was taking over from the pictorialist style ie a sharper focus and sense of reality rather than trying to reproduce the effects of paint.

The exhibition showed many techniques such as using photography to show the effect of water as a mirror and trying to capture the movement of water in a still medium. Adams sometimes used the idea of a sequence of 2 or more frames to show how the water changes such as the surf sequence from 1940 shown here.

There were lots of stunning images such as Maroon Bells, a study in texture; a big print of Mirror Lake, California; minimalist submerged trees from 1965, thundercloud, Lake Tahoe 1938, sundown from Carmel Highlands 1946 and reflections at Mono Lake 1948. However my favourite was a wonderful almost abstract study of ice and water reflections where ice has melted forming a mirror reflecting rocks around it which are not shown in the photo.

I liked the fact that so many of the images came from California both the coast and inland mountain areas like Yosemite. It brought back happy memories of a holiday there many years ago.

 

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