Images of America Before Its Fall

By ROBERT HUGHES

In American photography, Ansel Adams is the Old Man of the Mountain: a grizzle-bearded septuagenarian, wrinkled and piercing of eye, toting his tripod through the redwoods. It was almost 60 years ago that Adams, a teenage music student from San Francisco, took a box Brownie with him on a vacation in the Yosemite Valley and started clicking away at its prodigious crags. Since then he has become one of the most respected photographers and teachers in America, laden with honors and pursued by collectors. (His own selection of his work, with a foreword by Pulitzer Prizewinner Wallace Stegner, will be published by New York Graphic Society in September.) Adams, who joined the Sierra Club in 1920, has also had a substantial role in spreading the gospel of ecology and conservation.

His present retrospective of 156 prints at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (through June 30) consists almost wholly of landscape photographs. He has appropriated Yosemite and some of the more picturesque and wind-blown surfaces of Northern California and the Southwest as his own, by territorial right of imagery. His pictures include some of the grand cliches of modern American photography, but they are cliches Adams has a prescriptive right to, since he invented them. What Edward Weston did for driftwood and bell peppers Ansel Adams did for mountains, rivers and rocks: recording them with a grave and highly deliberate formal density, he gave their images an extraordinary presence that hovers at the edge of abstraction. In the process he became the last practitioner of a 19th century mode--epic landscape.

Rock Cathedrals. Photographs like that of Mount Williamson, with its tumbled granitic boulders and slanting cathedral illumination in the sky--as if God had accepted Adams as his art director--have been instrumental in fixing the idea of "wilderness" for two generations of Americans. Probably half the millions of frames of TriX and Polaroid that tourists expose in Yosemite each season are homages, conscious or not, to Adams--sentiment imitating art in the presence of nature. Just as the traveling painters of the past century like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran imposed a particular vision of the West on our ancestors, Adams has imposed his on us. It is still America before its fall, a rugged paradise unmarred by the nasty litter and twitter of Homo sapiens. No living photographer of landscape seems able to match the amplitude of Adams' work -- those vast and feathered skies, those muscular loops of river, those cannonball moons gravely pre siding over cliffs and rocks that, in their solidity of tone, seem like concretions of geological time.

"Awoke in a kind of vision," he jot ted in his diary in 1931. "It was like the Annunciation! Suddenly I saw what photography could be ... a tremendously potent pure art form." His effort was to take photography away from its documentary role. A kind of ecstatic nature worship has provided the impetus for Adams' work since the '30s, not only on the large scale but on the small as well: witness an image of stems floating on black water, a pattern as subtle and vivacious as those of old Japanese textiles.

Pickled in Nostalgia. In the mean time, of course, photography has gone in other, less romantic directions, of which Adams is intolerant. "Whenever I see a picture of a garbage dump," he huffed to a reporter during a New York visit in 1972, "I am not the least bit moved. I have a garbage dump; I could take a photograph of my ash can that would be just as revolting as anything you can get here in Harlem." No won der Adams' ideas about his art seem quite pickled in nostalgia to a generation of younger photographers whose sensibilities are roused by the urban mess, from trash to glitter. Adams' work is criticized for being indifferent to the flow of historical time and documentary "relevance," a recognized exception being the photos he took of Japanese Americans persecuted in the anti-Nisei hysteria during World War II.

But there is one area in which admiration for Adams' work is universal: his command of tonal range on his prints. "The negative is the score," he says, "the print is the performance." Ad ams can do things with a print that are the despair of professional developers: his ability to bring out every nuance of tone within a shadow, gray overlapping black, so that each detail of form is both implicit and simultaneously present, is astounding. The difference of quality be tween an Adams print and one made by a studio from an Adams negative is just as evident as the difference between a first and a tenth edition of an etching. It is the responsiveness of his printing, combined with his long wait at the view finder, that gives Adams' handmade landscapes their unique and poetic clarity. If he is an anachronism, as some crit ics claim, Adams remains the most commanding anachronism in modern camerawork.

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