Ansel Adams - Research Paper Example

In this essay, I would discuss the various life experiences and natural aesthetic exposures that created a photographic genius, Ansel Adams. His congenial relationships with other renowned photographers such as Edward Weston and his travels to Yosemite and Taos Pueblo proved to be of great assistance to his prophetic vision of natural preservation. I will analyze particular photographs that defined Ansel Adams as a photographer using these influences in his long career. Lastly, I will scrutinize a particular photograph which holds much detail that Ansel Adams was trying to represent in his every picture.

The photograph Line Crew Work in Manzanar looks like at first glimpse a commonplace and typical image of work life. But in a much deeper look, the photograph actually reveals even more that are invisible to the unaided eye. In 1932, a group of photographers from Bay Area were occasionally gathering for conversation and wine at the home of Willard Van Dyke in Berkeley. The group consisted of photographers in different phases of development. Ansel Adams, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Sonya Noskowiak and Henry Swift were amateurs in their professions.

Imogen Cunningham, on the contrary, almost fifty, took pleasure on a well-known reputation. Under the persuasion and example of the well-recognized Edward Weston, a member of the group, Cunningham was initiating the shift from Pictorialism to an acute, more realistic approach. The transition of Cunningham puts emphasis on what had unified the whole group in the first place: a resolve to perform photography as an independent form of art. Thus far, the group consented, photography had not entirely unshackled itself from the academic and artistic superiority of painting and literature: dominance somehow apparent in the mild-emphasis, narrative-controlled Pictorialist approach.

Even the Photo Secessionism performed by other photographers such as Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz,