ANSEL ADAMS (American, 1902-1984) MOONRISE, HER

As icons go, there are few in photography that match the everlasting power of MOONRISE, HERNANDEZ, NEW MEXICO. The image seems so perfect in its depiction of a peaceful Southwest village, nestled in a valley surrounded by the rugged mountains that make the cinematic terrain of the American West legendary worldwide. (Never mind that just off camera was a gas station, clearly not suitable for framing.) More than simply a landscape photograph, MOONRISE has come to represent a cultural ideal, the pictorial equivalent of a truly American character. It is also representative of an approach and method in photography that became synonymous with an academic, heroic aspect of Modernist photography and thus, fodder for a revolution.

In the 1970s photography faced a crisis of purpose. Picture magazines were close to completely losing their public influence to television, alternative histories of the medium appeared challenging the Beaumont Newhall standard and Deconstructivist theory permeated university graduate programs seeking the latest in philosophical ideas. Where the grandeur of nature had once reigned in photography, the re-presentation of reality became of primary concern. Agendas were out, objectivity was in, causing Nicholas Nixon, one of the exhibiting photographers in the 1975 exhibition, NEW TOPOGRAPHICS: PHOTOGRAPHS OF A MAN-ALTERED LANDSCAPE to declare, "The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions concerning it" (c.f., exhibition catalogue, p. 5). The aesthetics of NEW TOPOGRAPHICS: can be seen as a reaction against the photographer as the valiant documentarian of all that is good or evil in the world.

One common characteristic is true of photographers today, especially the descendents of New Topographics—they love to play with scale. Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, have all executed works that compete for attention in painting's traditional realm. Of all the landscape photographers that preceded them however, it was Ansel Adams that most consistently grasped the possibility in large-scale work, decades prior to what current technologies more easily allow. Adams, in the 1950s and '60s, produced photographic murals, proudly exhibited as fine art photographs. Their scale, ironically, is the precursor to today's humungous contemporary works. The photographers of the 1970s, determined to eliminate the Romanticism associated with Adams, have given rise to a generation devoted to wall power, returning to the same effects that so enamored the grand master of the American landscape.