Assignment 4: a critical review; Ansel Adams

After much thought I have decided to use Ansel Adams as my subject for Assignment 4's critical review.  Of the suggested photographers I quickly dismissed Robert Adams.  Although socially important, perhaps of the same genre as John Kippin and Chris Wainright in' Furtureland' and 'Futureland Now' and certainly in tune with Henri Cartier-Bresson when he criticised Ansel Adams and Edward Weston for playing about photographing rocks and trees when the world was going to pieces, it is not a style of photography I enjoy.  I think that John Fowles would be approving of his work as he says in his introduction to Fay Godwin's 'Land' how he dislikes a lot of Landscape Photography as it portrays the world as a falsely beautiful place and the practitioners ignore the ugly in the world.  Fay certainly did not ignore the mundane and the ugly but she does manage to make it look beautiful at the same time.  I was tempted to use Fay as the subject of my essay for this reason and also as I am familiar of many of the landscapes she portrays.  She was also a walker and a president of the Ramblers Association.  I also really love the work of Galen Rowell who was also a mountaineer and visited many of the remote regions of the world.  I like his approach where he deliberately rated his film stock at a higher ISO than it actually was in order to achieve richly saturated colours.  I really enjoy the rich black and white images of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.  I decided to choose Adams partly because I like his images but also because I have a fascination with Yosemite, although I have never been to America never mind Yosemite itself.  My fascination with the valley, though, began more years ago than I care to remember when I was a member of my college mountaineering society.  During that time Mick Burke (later killed on Everest) came to give a lecture on 'Big Wall Climbing' and showed many fabulous images of Yosemite Valley.  I was smitten and it wasn't long afterwards before I came across the work of Ansel Adams.  In his youth Adams was also a mountaineer and this, too, drew me to him.  I have thought about current landscape photographers such as Joe Cornish or David Noton but felt that Ansel Adams was more seminal.

I include here my first thoughts on my review.

Brief biography
Why I chose him
Influences, Early years and Yosemite/Pictorialsm v. Modernism
Other work - i.e. conservation, and letters
Group F64
Previsualisation and Equivalence
Zone system
Style of photography - Sharp focus through out, rich b&w, exposing/printing for the highlights and reducing shadows to nearly black, smooth papers
Colour work
His importance. In his lifetime often hard up for money and not really publicised until he was nearly in his 70s.
His lasting influence