Picture Perfect Adams Exhibit at MFA

The first room of the Museum of Fine Arts’ (MFA) sprawling Ansel Adams exhibit, “Early Work,” is the most enthralling. Prints framed in darker wood, mounted on grayer walls, and lit by dimmer lighting evoke the great American landscape photographer in his teens and twenties struggling to find the most direct and honest way to express his sense of awe on trips to Yosemite and elsewhere in the Western wilderness.

Adams made these first few dozen prints in the pictorialist style of his contemporaries, for whom photography didn’t inherently qualify as art. The pictorialists felt the need to touch up their images in the developing tray, even draw on them with a special kind of ink. A print very low on detail, foggy and mysterious, would result, bearing no resemblance at all to the meticulously precise images many viewers expect from Adams.

But a few of these pictures, unknown to all but the most resourceful Adams admirers, are startlingly successful. “From Moose Pass, Canadian Rockies, 1928,” is one of them—incredibly soft, small, composed of only a handful of shades of gray, and lacking detail, it’s the opposite of what people often think of as an Adams print. Yet it conveys that same sublime, pristine nature that Adams captured so famously in his later work.

This gallery also includes a lot of Adams’ early failures, created as he tried to escape the binds of the popular style and the limiting technology of the day. His scenes of grandeur are framed in a manner similar to those that would make him famous—but they are presented with too much contrast and a washed-out sky.

Then at last one comes to “Monolith: The Face of Half Dome, 1927,” which the museum bills as Adams’ great revelation. It’s in this photograph, the exhibit says, that Adams first used his technique of “pre-visualization,” through which he captured and predicted the emotional impact of a scene before opening the shutter.

The image—presented in two prints, one from 1927 and the other made three to four decades later to show how Adams used advances in technology to his advantage—marked the beginning of the photographer’s transition from pictorialism to his trademark “straight” photography. “It’s really not unreasonable to liken it to a religious conversion,” says Rebecca Senf, one of the exhibit’s curators.

The rest of the 180 or so photographs in the exhibit trace Adams’ mastery of straight photography—a style emphasizing sharp detail and tonal range over fuzzy abstraction that Adams gleaned from contemporaries like Paul Strand and Edward Weston. But while the latter two used the technique to capture the intricacies of daily life with pictures of people, bicycles and bell peppers, Adams took the requisite large-format view camera (he shot each frame on huge, eight-by-ten-inch sheets of film) into the wilderness.

The resulting images have defined Ansel Adams and the American West. There’s the captivating “Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, 1944,” with an imposing white mountain range in the background and a foreground shrouded in uneven shadow as the sun sets. There’s the photographer’s most famous image, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941,” in which he does what a photography teacher would almost certainly advise against, leaving the entire top half of the picture black. The tiny full moon sits on that border with darkness, watching over the little village of Hernandez bathed in an unearthly light.

But these easily-recognizable prints can be found in art galleries around Boston. What is unique at the MFA is context and variety: photographs of Manhattan that Adams took when he visited the photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York; poignant and funny pictures of run-down Western towns; a crazy photograph of sodium calcite crystals in Adams’s developing tray; a striking portrait of Georgia O’Keefe and Orville Cox; and, among Adams’ last pictures, an aerial view of a Los Angeles freeway interchange that evokes the powerful feeling of discovering something new and beautiful in the mundane—much like earlier close-ups of ferns and lichen.

Despite the variety of subjects on display, Adams’ style doesn’t change much after the first gallery. Everything is “straight”; printed on glossy paper, fore- and background are in focus, the lighting is favorable, and the camera still. According to Senf, who is also a graduate student in art history at Boston University, Adams helped make straight photography become the standard for art photography today.

Oceans of ink have and will be spilled about whether that straightness and literalness should diminish Adams’ claim to be the greatest American photographer. Yet Adams remains the quintessential American photographer because he took photography’s power of honest reproduction to the places where it’s needed most: the pristine, and threatened, wilderness. Wilderness, after all, has been key to the American psyche, and no one has captured it more powerfully, enthusiastically, lovingly, and faithfully than Adams.

And perhaps no one has captured Adams himself as well as the MFA, whose show—on display through December 31, and free to Harvard students—is eye-openingly complete. It’s a brilliant opportunity to meet, re-encounter, and, perhaps, re-judge one of history’s few masters of landscape photography.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.