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Jun. 29--The majesty of America's West, captured by one of the 20th century's premier photographers, will be exhibited beginning tomorrow in the Toledo Museum of Art.
Ansel Adams: Visions of the West, includes 39 images taken by the late California outdoorsman, conservationist, and technical wizard.
"Here in the Midwest we need a little bit of a reminder of the grandeur of the country," said Thomas Loeffler, the museum's collections manager for works on paper.
Among the 40,000 photographs Adams produced during his nearly seven-decade career, his subjects included the University of California campuses in the 1960s, the Mormons of Utah, and Americans of Japanese descent forced to live in California's Manzanar internment camp during World War II, for which he was called disloyal.
But he's best known for his nature photographs, images he often enhanced to make darker or lighter.
"He was a technical wizard in the darkroom," said Loeffler.
Precocious and energetic, Adams was born in 1902, the only child of well-to-do San Franciscans. He despised the regimentation of school, and when he was 13, his parents withdrew him and hired tutors of piano and ancient Greek. His father gave him a pass to the huge Panama-Pacific Exposition in what is now San Francisco's Marina District, and he visited the marvelous place nearly every day for the 10 months it operated.
At 14, he talked his parents into vacationing in Yosemite, and they gave him a Kodak Box Brownie camera. At 17, he was hired as the summer custodian of the Sierra Club's Yosemite headquarters, a job he returned to for years, leading tours, maintaining a library, and installing cables for hikers climbing the back of Half Dome mountain. And, it's where he met his wife, Virginia Best Adams, whose father was a painter and ran a gift shop there.
His first photograph was published in the Sierra Club bulletin in 1920 when he was 18.
Through his 20s, he intended to become a concert pianist, but eventually became disillusioned by the politics of San Francisco's musical community. By then, he had met a wealthy arts patron who underwrote a portfolio of 18 of Adams' prints; 100 were published and sold for $50 each.
Adams was ambitious, adept at networking, and savvy about getting his images out to the public via affordable books. He wrote manuals and articles about camera techniques, helped start a camera club, established a gallery, and lobbied Congress to make Kings Canyon a national park.
In 1935, married with two babies, he established a conservation convention and wildflower festival. He landed a contract with the U.S. Department of Interior to photograph national parks. In 1936, he exhibited at the New York City gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, husband of painter Georgia O'Keeffe. He was a consultant for the Polaroid Corp. and co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department.
Around 1940, Adams changed the way he manipulated images to intensify darks and lights. He used various filters and altered exposure time. On location at a shoot, he visualized the final product.
"Before he took the picture, before he clicked the shutter, he had all this figured out," said Loeffler.
Adams used contrast even more dramatically later in life. The results were controversial and labeled "abstraction" by some critics, a term he disliked.
"The negative is the equivalent to the composer's score: the print is the performance, there is an element of interpretation in the print," Adams said.
The museum's Gallery 18 features landscapes and a few close-ups ranging from 8 by 10 inches up to 20 by 24 inches. They're owned by the museum and two collectors who live in Toledo and Ann Arbor. Some were made by Adams, others were produced posthumously from his negatives, said Loeffler, adding that the exhibit was the idea of museum director Don Bacigalupi.
Adams was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Carter in 1980. Six weeks before his death in 1984, he was interviewed by The Blade about what color the Anthony Wayne Bridge should be painted. He suggested the red-lead color of the Golden Gate Bridge. "It's very effective in the landscape," he said. He also liked the concept of a shiny, aluminum color, but noted that such paint wouldn't hold up well against the elements.
Blue? "It's very difficult. It shows the dirt. It's not too good," he said.
Later that year, the 3,750-foot-long span over the Maumee River was painted pale blue.
"Ansel Adams: Visions of the West" opens tomorrow and continues through Sept. 24 in the Toledo Museum of Art, 2445 Monroe St. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Mondays and major holidays. There is no admission fee. Info: 419-255-8000 or www.toledomuseum.org.
Contact Tahree Lane at: tlane@theblade.com or 419-724-6075.
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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