The choice of Ansel Adams, master of American landscape photography, may seem odd for a major exhibition at the National Maritime Museum. But as Phillip Prodger, curator of photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in maritime Massachussettes who put the show together with the NMM's curators, pointed out at today's preview, a lot of his work has to do with water – sea, rivers, lakes, waterfalls, geysers, clouds...
Adams grew up in a house by the beach in San Francisco, and among the prints, each one hand made, is his very first picture, taken at the age of 14 at the city's 1915 World's Fair. The image is the pavilion that showcased European modern artists, some exhibiting in the US for the first time, including Leger, Picasso and Duchamp, with his Nude Descending a Staircase. None of this is visible in his picture of the waterside building, but the effect the paintings had on young Ansel was.
Also shown are his largest prints, made from sheets of paper seamlessly joined together. Adams was a talented pianist as well as a master of printmaking, and he believed that a photographic negative was like a musician's score, and the printing was the performance.
In the 1930s he was a member of f64, a group who rejected the idea that a photograph should have a point of focus, but that every detail of a picture should be pin-sharp. In this digital age, this is not difficult to achieve, though emulating his photographs is. He died in 1984, just as digital was arriving, and in film footage of an interview with him, he is enthusiastic about the new media. It would be interesting to know, were he alive today, how he would have used computers to continue his art.
Ansel Adams: Photography from the Mountains to the Sea is on at the National Maritime Museum until April 28, 2013. See the website.
* Next year the National Maritime Museum and the conservation charity Thames 21 are running a competition, inviting entries of Ansel-Adams style photographs of the Thames or other London waterways.
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