Ansel Adams 1902-1984

Carmel, Center for Photographic Art,  Ansel Adams: From the Private Collection of Margaret Weston, July - September 1995

San Francisco, The Friends of Photography, Ansel Adams: From the Private Collection of Maggi Weston, May - September 1996

Other prints of this image:

Ansel Adams, Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography (How to Do It Series No. 8) (London and New York, 4th edition, 1948), p. 65

Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images 1916-1984 (Boston, 1988), p. 319

John Szarkowski, The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (Boston, 1977), p. 102

Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (Boston, 1983), p. 112

In his extensive body of work, the early Still Life offered here was one of Ansel Adams's favorite images.  He included it in his first commercially-published book, Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography, in 1935, and decades later in Portfolio VI, published by Parasol Press in 1974.  In a letter to Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Adams wrote that Still Life was typical of his work from the early 1930s, when an important source of his income was advertising photography.  The Still Life, however, was made purely for himself, and he wrote that it appealed to him '. . . as a fine example of style and craft.  It is almost universally admired. . .' (Letters and Images, p. 319).   Aside from the portfolio edition, of which the present print is one, few prints of the image are known to exist.

Adams also selected Still Life for discussion in his book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs.  The image pleased him and, he supposed, his audience, for its value as a purely aesthetic experience, one which juxtaposed shapes, textural variety, and a range of tonal values.  It was source of amusement to Adams and Edward Weston that they had coincidentally photographed the same type of egg slicer, unbeknownst to one another, around the same period.