Picture perfect

Ansel Adams at WAM

by Leon Nigrosh

BUILDING FORM: ANSEL ADAMS AND ARCHITECTURE At the Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury Street, through October 18.

Although Ansel Adams passed away in 1984, his photographic images are still as inspiring today as they were more than 60 years ago. In the early '30s, along with Bay Area photographers Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke, Adams founded Group f.64 in reaction to the pictorialist style of photography then in vogue. These brash, young photographers were tired of the romantic, misty, soft-focus pabulum being fed to the masses. They sought to make their pictures "natural" -- straight, crisp and with great depth of field.

Well-known for his waterfalls, trees, and mountains, which made him financially successful as a naturalist photographer, Adams also found similar qualities of light and form in architecture. The current exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum showcases 46 of Adams's rarely seen architectural photos selected from his personal archives. The works, spanning more than 40 years, are not reprints but vintage originals all hand-printed by Adams himself.

Included in his exhibit is Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, shot in 1941 and perhaps Adams's most famous picture. In it we see a sweep of landscape, the moon just hovering above wispy clouds, and sharp images of tiny, whitewashed cemetery crosses at the edge of the adobe village. Everything appears right -- tonal values, linear composition, changing points of interest, each detail in perfect focus -- just as if we were standing there ourselves. Except that is not what we would actually have seen. Human eyes cannot bring every detail of a vista into sharp focus all at once.

This is the key fact that makes Adams's photographs so enchanting. By manipulating the front and rear standards of his large, heavy, eight-by-10-inch sheet-film view camera, Adams could bring every point of his subject into clear focus. Add a little darkroom magic and he could produce works like his 1953 San Francisco from San Bruno Mountain, California, another dramatically charged panoramic view complete with miniscule white truck, if you can find it.

To create the feeling he wanted in each picture, Adams would "previsualize" his image, returning to the particular site on several occasions, timing the sunlight positions, noting cloud formations, shadow angles, and every minute detail until he concluded that conditions would be just right. Only then would he set up his camera and wait for the precise moment to open the shutter.

In 1950, he performed this ritual before making Mission San Xavier del Bac, Domes and Finials, Tucson, Arizona, concentrating on the light and shade that played across its strong horizontal composition of curving white masses. Eighteen years later, Adams returned to the mission and set his camera at a different angle to produce Arches, North Court, Mission San Xavier del Bac, Tucson, Arizona. This time the strong sunlight splashes across the whitewashed facades to create a dance of hemispherical masses competing for attention with inky black wrought-iron tendrils in an exceeding complex, but easily consumed composition.

The exhibition also contains images of deserted silos, ghost town buildings, Cape Cod barns, boarded-up churches, and abandoned adobe huts. In 1941, Adams photographed one such ruin, Adobe Ruin, Abiquiu, New Mexico, while presumably on a visit to see painter Georgia O'Keefe. Shot from the interior, the image reads like a picture within a picture. Diagonal shadows from the open log roof create strong black and white lines that frame a small doorway that opens on a tiny yard. Look closely and you can see the laundry line.

Aside from being marvelous explorations into the visual elements of light, shape, texture, and space, these photos are really all about people -- the people who designed the buildings, the people who built them, who inhabited them, and, in many cases, those who abandoned them. Yet there is not a single person in any of the images. By presenting his subjects in such an open and non-judgmental manner, Adams invited his viewers to thoughtfully study the works and then step into them, applying their own imaginations to develop a story line that satisfied each of them in their own fashion. It worked 60 years ago. It still works today.

The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call 799-4406.