Art Hop Stop 1: The Taft

Whatever I knew of f-stops and shutter speeds I have long forgotten. But I still remember the smell of the darkroom chemicals (vinegar mostly) and my love of burning and dodging light onto prints. The process as much as the product was the goal... of getting the light just-so, the shadows just-so, and considering if the final print accurately captured the feeling of the moment.

At the Taft Museum of Art's current exhibit Ansel Adams: A Photographer's Evolution there is a replica darkroom to illustrate the printing process Adams underwent in his photography. Ray and I, on a self-guided art hop Saturday afternoon, both marveled at how much we still remembered about wet baths and red lights and how interactive and engaging (and time consuming) printing a single print was. 

So we're putting a darkroom in at our house. Ray doesn't know this yet but I've already ordered a few vats of stop-bath so Erie Avenue should be smelling like nostalgia and acrid fumes in no time. 

Well, probably not. But I did want to hold the exhibit and in my hands and not let it go. Retrospectives are great because you get to consider an artist in whole. What changes and iterations evolved over time, and how the world and friends and mentors shaped those changes. 

"‘Here is the equivalent of what I saw and felt.' That is all I can ever say in words about my photographs; they must stand or fall, as objects of beauty and communication, on the silent evidence of their equivalence.” Ansel Adams

From his smaller, intimately sized early works to the grand-scale landscapes of sweeping mountain ranges later in his career, the exhibition showcases his changing aesthetic as a photographer and the ways he experimented with contrast and light on the same landscapes.

I admit, I had never seen nor or heard of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico before Saturday, apparently an icon of 20th-century photography. Thank you to the Taft Museum for enlightening me. 

Adams made over 1,300 prints of the image. 

"Over time, he printed Moonrise progressively darker, with a jet-black sky, brighter clouds at the horizon, and crosses gleaming with light against a shadowy landscape." Exhibit Curator

Two of those prints are in the exhibit, an early print and another made 30-years later. It's marvelous to see how the same image changes in his mind over time. The story of how he captured the image is great too. 

"The situation was desperate: the low sun was trailing the edge of the clouds in the west, and shadow would soon dim the white crosses."

The people I like best are those who describe the race against the setting sun on their perfect image as "desperate." Indeed, it would not be the same image if those crosses were not lit up in the churchyard. (And that star just above the moon... a star? Jupiter? Venus perhaps? Maybe Mars?)

Seeing 'Moonrise' and 'Grand Tetons from Jackson Lake, 1940' is worth the price of admission for those three photos alone. You have until Sept. 16, GO. 

On the way out we checked-out Twisted, which is six tons of willow tree saplings twisted into a sculpture called "Far Flung." It's imaginative and cool and a bit bizarre. 

Next up on the blog, stop 2, The Weston Gallery. Ray and I aren't often so cultured and ambitious, but we made the most of our Saturday with two different exhibits. Stay tuned.