Customer Reviews

Spirit of Wild Places: Ansel Adams and the National Parks (Art Series)

5 star:		(0)
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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Unable, or unwilling, to secure the cooperation of Adams' estate, the publishers of this book have used images from the US national archive.

These substandard images have been reproduced hair, dust and all! It's an insult to a man who spent his life teaching and promoting quality photography.

This book was done without the authorization of the Ansel Adams Photographic Trust, as was duly noted in the book.

The volume reproduces Ansel Adams' images in a way that badly distorts his style. Most of the images are so dark and over inked that all you can see are the outlines. Adams' work was all about light and using details to show connections among objects. The only benefit you will get from seeing these images is to realize why Adams insisted on such tight control over his work. You will also come to more fully appreciate his comments about how his "reality" depended on what happened with the print, not with the negative.

Miraculously, a few images were reproduced in wonderful fashion. But you have to look long and hard to find them. Don't bother. I suggest you stick with the authorized versions of his work instead, which are all published by Little Brown. The main flaws of those volumes is that Little Brown designed the books in many cases to make the images too small.

Why, then, did I assign this book two stars rather than one? Well, I rather liked the essay by Eric Peter Nash about Adams. Nash provides a good balance between writing a short biography of Adams as a person, his development as a photographer through using new techniques, and Adams' reflections on his contemporaries. The essay is much longer than in other books about Ansel Adams and added usefully to my knowledge about his photographic techniques.

My advice is to read the essay and consider it in the context of images in other books. I would suggest you avoid buying this book.

After you have finished reading the essay, I suggest you consider how your purposes might not be followed as you wish when you are no longer alive. For example, do you have any possessions that you would like to have given to a certain person or handled in a certain way? Do you have a will that provides for those events to take place? Do you have an executor of the will who understands your purposes and is likely to outlive you?

Pass on your insights with care!

It's too bad that this author was unable to get good reproductions of Adams' best work. It's frustrating to read his intelligent commentary on a given well-known image when it's not even in the book, such as a famous picture of aspen trunks that as it turns out were not actually sun-struck as they seem to be in the print, etc.

The writer also has many interesting biographical details about Adams that I never knew from buying fourteen earlier books on the man (including the expensive "Images: 1923-1974" and all of the Basic Photo series), and good insights on the opposing camps of photography throughout the twentieth century and where Adams stood in relation to them.

Sadly, the reproductions in this book are so poorly done that if I didn't know better, I would be foolishly bragging that I am a better photographer than Ansel Adams. The pictures are, for the most part, relatively unknown and for good reason: a good chunk of them are from a project for which Adams was hired by the government to go around and photograph several of the big national parks, ones that he seems to have had little interest in (or perhaps alloted time to cover.) The distinct sense is that his heart was not in it, or that he had just a few days in each park.

Most of the compositions are exceedingly generic and unexciting, lacking the dramatic weather conditions and rare lighting effects that he got during all of the quality time he spent in his beloved Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada, and the Southwest. He really seems almost indifferent to Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain, and Glacier National Parks. As for the other areas, they are represented by what can only called his "second string" pictures. If an occasional "famous" image shows up, it is so murky and tonally blah that the entire impact is lost.

There is a kind of black-and-white reproduction called "duotone" (and even one using three tones) that can do a good job of reproducing a fine black-and-white photograph. You won't find it here. These are like newspaper photos, but done on a good grade of glossy paper instead of newsprint. The shots used seem way over-weighted towards uninteresting mountain peaks, and if someone told me that they were topographic inventory shots done for a study of glacier shrinkage, I would never protest that they seemed too artistic for such a mundane purpose.

Ansel always warned against a "soot and chalk" effect in a print, and here we have a selection of his most uninteresting work reproduced in exactly that way, except that the soot isn't even really black but a dull, murky,and peculiarly unpleasant emptiness. The whites lose all shading and gradation and are flat and without sparkle. There are no subtleties in the middle gray tones.

But I liked reading it; luckily I have, in my other books, all of the referenced photos that the author mentioned so I could see what he was talking about. You might not.