Ansel Adams at 100

Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Ansel Adams at 100 celebrates the centenary of one of America's best-loved photographers. This superlative catalog of an exhibition organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presents the most dramatic and the most delicate of Adams's formal compositions, from spectacular mountainscapes to grasses on a pond, all reflecting his avowedly religious relationship to nature. Previously unpublished examples of Adams's early images show how he worked through the day, using changing light and different vantage points to interpret a subject. A fascinating comparison of his darkroom techniques is given in two printings of a 1948 negative of Mount McKinley, made in 1949 and 1978 to very different effects, one brooding and luminous, the other crisp and monumental. (The conventional wisdom is to prefer the earlier, but this reviewer loves them both.) The text by John Szarkowski, director emeritus of New York MoMA's photography department, gives biographical details and gracefully places Adams in the history of 20th-century photography and the conservation movement. Impeccable technical standards were a hallmark of Adams's work, and this book follows his tradition. Each black-and-white image is a tritone, meaning that it was printed from three different plates corresponding to different parts of the original photograph's gray scale, resulting in an extremely rich chromatic range. Light really does appear to glisten off a wet rock, and white aspens to glow. The images have been very carefully chosen, each page of a double spread complementing the other. The book's paper is custom-made, it is bound in linen and presented in a linen slipcase, and a complimentary facsimile of one of Adams's icons is included. The whole adds up to a most unusual and pleasing artifact: Ansel Adams at 100 consciously sets out to be the definitive study of a master, and it succeeds. --John Stevenson


From Publishers Weekly
Grandly proportioned, linen-bound and graceful as the images it conveys, Ansel Adams at 100 commemorates the birth of the famous native San Franciscan photographer with 114 of Adams's rich, beloved images spanning his oeuvre, and some delightful photos of the artist. The book and accompanying centennial exhibit at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art (Aug. 2001-Jan. 2002), curated by John Szarkowski, director of the department of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art, reevaluate the impact of Adams's work on photography, landscapes and the audience. "His pictures have enlarged our visceral knowledge of things that we do not understand," writes Szarkowski. He relates specific epiphanies that propelled Adams's evolution as an artist, such as when he shot Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, having suddenly realized that using a specific filter would "deepen the tone of the sky almost to black" and capture his emotional experience of the vista. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
Destined to be the definitive book on this master photographer and written to accompany a major international exhibition of his work, Ansel Adams at 100 is one of the most beautiful books ever created. Its author, John Szarkowski, is the most influential photography curator and critic of our time. Mr. Szarkowski is directing the Centennial exhibition, which opens in Adams' hometown, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 20010800, and tours for more than two years to the great museums of Chicago, London, Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York. Szarkowski has painstakingly selected what he considers Adams' greatest work - 114 images - and has tracked down the single best photographic print of each. This is the first serious effort to reconsider Adams' achievements as an artist since his death in 1984. Szarkowski presents an unexpected and sometimes unfamiliar body of work. His lengthy critical essay speaks to his judgment of the importance of Ansel Adams as a modern artist. SPECIAL FEATURES - Volume is bound in a natural linen cloth with matching slipcase (please see "Look Inside this Book" image) - 114 images scanned and printed in tritone - The book is printed on special 115 lb. French paper - The book is designed by the award-winning J. Abbot Miller of Pentagram - As an added bonus, a limited collector's edition frameable print will be packaged with the book. Each print bears Ansel Adams' facsimile signature and the embossed seal of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.


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In celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ansel Adams, Little, Brown and Company publishes the most significant book yet on his work - an oversized Centennial volume edited and with a text by the curator John Szarkowski. Szarkowski has selected what he considers Adams' greatest work - 114 images - and has tracked down the single best photographic print of each. This is the first serious effort to recognize Adams' achievements as an artist since his death in 1984. Szarkowski presents an unexpected and sometimes unfamiliar body of work. His critical essay speaks to his judgment of the importance of Ansel Adams as a modern artist.


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