Eloquent Light: Ansel Adams. The Classic Biography

Aperture. Very Good/Very Good. 1981. Hard Cover. Folio. Dimensions: 34.8 x 26.8 x 2 cm 0893810665 Dust jacket price clipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine.Ownership inscription on ffep. 200 pages. Reconstructs the life and career of photographer Ansel Adams, drawing on the letters and words of Adams, his family, friends, and colleagues and featuring a selection of his famous photographs. For more than sixty years, since making his first photographs of Yosemite Valley, Ansel Adams has sought to capture "the instant of revelation-of timelessness." The landscapes for which he is best known are as eloquent in their use of texture, form, and light as nature itself. His world is one of forests and of rivers running like quicksilver, of distant waterfalls and of rocky domes and spires that rise through mist or swirling snows or bask in brilliant light. In this solitary world, every element of nature is rendered with intense clarity. The Eloquent Light, originally published by The Sierra Club in 1963, traces Adams's life and career from 1902 through 1938, his formative years. Nancy Newhall drew on the letters and words of Adams, his family, and his colleagues to create this book. Newhall herself was a close friend who, as she put it, "in the course of twenty years, crawled under Adams's focusing cloth almost a thousand times:' Her close association with Adams makes her book more than just a biography-it is a record of a new beginning in American photography. Adams's photographs evolved out of an interplay between his own imagination and the influences that chance and choice brought to bear upon him. He was fourteen when he discovered the Sierra Nevada through the lens of his first camera. These early photographs started out as a simple, spontaneous visual diary. Gradually, he began to pay closer attention to the aesthetic dimensions and photographed in the prevailing style of the time, which was impressionistic and lyrical Then at Taos in 1930 he met photographer Paul Strand and saw for the first time images that wove "light and substance... into an intense incandescence' From that moment on, Adams put aside all traces of the soft-focus pictorialism of the past, and with a group of friends-Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, and Imogen Cunningham among others-added great force to the movement of "straight" photography through Group f/64. The Eloquent Light follows Adams through his encounters with such people as Stieglitz and Dorothea Lange. Stieglitz became Adams's most ardent champion and gave him his first important one-man show in New York in 1936 at his gallery, An American Place. "If you work with Ansel Adams',' Nancy Newhall writes, "you get up before dawn. Maybe you wake in a sleeping bag on the edge of a canyon, with immensity at your elbow, or in a ghostly shimmer of cholla cactus, under the monstrous columns and candelabra of saguaros.... He will get up at any hour, drive all night, or camp out on the spot if necessary in order to have his camera set up when the snow on the high snow peaks turn ashen". With an exacting eye for detail and a voice that is at once personal and precise, poetic and informative, Newhall pays tribute to both Adams the man and Adams the artist. .