Twentieth-century American photographer Ansel Adams famously said that
the photographic negative is like a composer's score, and the print a
performance. Drawn from the Ansel Adams Archive, at the Center for
Creative Photography, housed in Tucson at the University of Arizona,
this exhibition illustrates Adams's meaning. Throughout the exhibition
of sixty photographs, sets of prints—grouped in twos and
threes—show how on different occasions Adams created varying
interpretations from his own negatives. These groups demonstrate how,
using the same score, Adams was constantly revising the way it was
performed. Comparing and contrasting more than one print from the same
negative demonstrates Adams's choices about cropping, dodging and
burning, and overall contrast and brightness. The wealth of material
from the Adams Archive also reveals how, over time, his approach to
certain negatives changed as his perspective evolved, the field
transformed, and the available materials shifted. Above all, these
comparisons show that Adams invested time and care in each hand-made
print, producing interpretive artworks that come as much from his
imagination as from the landscapes before which he stood. All of the
exhibition's prints, spanning the master's six-decade career,
highlight Adams's particular talent and sensitivity as a photographic
printer. Many of the artworks are accompanied by quotations from
Adams's published writings, in which he discussed his process for an
image. The photographer was known for his role as an educator and
promoter of the photographic medium as an expressive artform, and he
enthusiastically shared his techniques through workshops, journal
articles, and publications. This presentation invites you to explore,
through Adams's body of work, the practice of black-and-white
printmaking, and the range of expression a skilled photographer can
create with this most fundamental of photographic processes.
Exhibition Date : January 11, 2020 - June 7, 2020.
photography
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08/04/2020 Last update