See ‘Discovering Ansel Adams’ in Cincinnati

Snowcaps top magnificent mountains standing sentry in the distance as light sneaks through the clouds above and illuminates a silvery, serpentine river. Captured in black and white, the image is so vivid that color is not required to communicate the tranquility and the gravity of the scene — it’s even better this way, echoing with majesty and eternity like so many of photographer Ansel Adams’ works.

Adams created this photo, “The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming,” in 1942, and it is among a prolific body of work that cemented the artist as a legend in the medium of landscape photography. 

“Discovering Ansel Adams,” on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum from Sept. 27 through Jan.19, provides a roadmap of the photographer’s life through roughly 80 photographs and about 30 artifacts, including his personal compass and a light meter, all of which showcase Adams not only a photographer but also an outdoorsman.

“He absolutely thought of himself as an artist, but his thoughts about art were always together with thoughts about conservation, the natural world and the United States,” says Nathaniel M. Stein, curator of photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Aside from one image, all the photographs in the exhibition are on loan from the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which Adams co-founded in the 1970s. This collection showcases what are deemed as some of his most influential works.

Adams’ journey as a photographer began with a Kodak Brownie and a trip to Yosemite at the age of 14. His love for the outdoors progressed along with his camera skills, and over the course of his lifetime, his use of natural lighting, use of cameras that allowed for incredible detail, and technical mastery of film exposure and development reshaped the world of landscape photography.

“His thinking and techniques taught many 20th-century photographers a very influential idea,” Stein says. “His influence is important both for people that have followed it and the for the people who have reacted in opposition to it.”

953 Eden Park Dr., Cincinnati 45202, 513/721-2787, cincinnatiartmuseum.org

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