Ansel Adams in Color - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821219804 ISBN 13: 9780821219805

Publisher: Little, Brown, 1993

Synopsis

This surprising book presents 50 beautiful full-color images by the great American landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, marking the first time that a significant body of Ansel Adams' color work has ever been published.

Ansel Adams began to photograph in color soon after Kodachrome was invented in the mid-1930s, and shot more that 3,000 color images during his lifetime. Very few of these photographs, however, were published or exhibited. As Adams remarked late in life after observing the advances in color printing techniques, "People are skeptical about my thoughts on color. I do not blame them, as I have protested it and have not shown my color pictures. I feel the urge now and wish I were sixty years younger!" The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, working with the distinguished photographer Harry Callahan, decided to share this remarkable body of work, reproduced in accordance with Adams' exacting standards, through state-of-the-art color imaging and printing technology.

These images, accompanied by an introductory essay by James Enyeart and a selection of Ansel Adams' thoughtful, often contradictory writings on color photography, add a fascinating new dimension to Adams' enduring legacy.

About this title

About the Author

In a career that spanned six decades, Ansel Adams was at once America's foremost landscape photographer and one of its most ardent environmentalists.

James Enyeart is the Director of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House. Formerly director of the Center for Creative Photography, he is the author of Decade by Decade: 20th Century American Photography(NYGS, 1989).

Reviews

Adams died in 1984, still planning a book on color photography, a topic that he had wrestled with since the 1950s and that gave him profound discomfort. He allowed that were he a young photographer in the 1980s, he'd work in color, yet in the last letter quoted herein he confessed, "I don't like photographic color. . . . It is not my dish of tea!" In other remarks, he was more analytic about color's challenges. Mostly, he regretted lack of control over intensity and hue, which afforded him no way to transform color as he transformed and exaggerated tonal values in black-and-white. For Adams, black-and-white was an abstract medium and color was inseparable from banal realism. He also sensed in himself a lack of "color imagination," the quality that distinguished the work of his colleague and friend Eliot Porter. He was right, yet he produced 3,000 color transparencies, most as tests for Kodak or for 1940s and 1950s commercial jobs. Eminent color photographer Harry Callahan culled 59 landscapes from this work for this album, which thoroughgoing photography collections will want in order to document Adams' beliefs about color photography and as testimony to the problems color has presented as a creative medium. Gretchen Garner

Although he claimed he did not like color photography, Ansel Adams nonetheless produced a highly accomplished if relatively small body of color work, selections of which are gathered here. These scintillating images embody the same refined detail and delicacy of light seen in Adams's black-and-white photographs. In fact, the subtleties of light so often overwhelmed in color photography are clearly evident here. Characterized by restrained, at times understated hues, the photographs are consistently remarkable. They have been ably selected and arranged by editor Callahan and are further enhanced by an informative introduction by James L. Enyeart. This beautifully designed and printed work, which is well worth its price, should be considered a standard title in all public and academic library collections. Highly recommended.
- Raymond Bial, Parkland Coll. Lib., Champaign, Ill.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0821219804
• ISBN 13: 9780821219805
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 131
• Editor: Harry M. Callahan