ANSEL ADAMS | ASPENS, NORTHERN NEW MEXICO

It was the yellow leaves on the young Aspen tree that first caught Ansel Adams’ eye as he and his wife Virginia were driving along the winding highway through the crest of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in 1958. Setting up his 8 x 10 camera with Cooke Series XV lens, he made this horizontal composition, before moving his camera slightly to the left to make a vertical image of the same subject (see Lot 106). With his Zone System of exposure, Adams captured both the radiantly-illuminated leaves and slender trunks of the Aspens emerging from the dark recesses of the surrounding forest.

Of this image, Adams wrote, ‘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, “The 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’ (Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, p. 63).

No stranger to the mural-sized format, Adams began printing in this scale when he was commissioned by the Yosemite Park & Curry Company to produce a series of murals of to be displayed at the 1935 San Diego Exposition. His subsequent work on the government-sponsored ‘Mural Project’ in 1941 only enhanced his affinity for the impressive format, and he wrote several texts and articles on mural theory and practice: 'I was fascinated with the challenge of making a photographic print in grand scale' (Ansel Adams: An Autobiography, p. 187).

The horizontal Aspens would go on to represent the environmental advocacy of the Sierra Club, adorning their stationary during the 1960s and illustrating the cover of This Is The American Earth, the collaborative publication by Adams and Nancy Newhall, released to commemorate the exhibition of the same name in 1956.