Ansel Adams at 100

This book is the ultimate "coffee table" book. No one can pick it up without becoming engrossed. More conversations get started in our house by this book, than any other source. If you have even the slightest interest in photographic art, then this is for you.

If you can only afford to buy one photo book / coffee table book this year . . . this is the book to buy. Period. This oversized book is beautifully reproduced and lovingly bound to last for ages; a commemorative print, not available elsewhere, is reproduced as a separate plate -- suitable for framing, which is a nice touch: Who among us can afford an original Ansel Adams photograph? As beautiful as this is as an example of book-making, its real value lies in the selection of photos.Of course, no two photographers will ever agree as to what photos should have been included in this massive retrospective -- outside of the obvious ones like "Moonrise Over Hernandez County" -- but every photographer who looks at this book should find inspiration in Ansel's inimitable "eye" that saw, and captured on film, the ordinary and transformed it into the extraordinary; a photographer who saw the extraordinary and transformed it into the sublime.As for the text: I think an academic perspective is certainly appropriate for such a retrospective, but I would dearly have loved to see a piece by, say, Joseph Holmes (NATURAL LIGHT--a gorgeous collection of photos) or another photographer to give it, so to speak, a "through the lens" perspective.Although there are other coffee-table sized books published of Ansel Adams's work, this one sets a high watermark and, as such, should find a permanent place in the library of every serious photographer, aspiring photographer, or anyone with a sense of beauty who can appreciate the rare and wonderful talent that is Ansel Adams.

This is a superb book. I was first introduced to Ansel Adams at work. While waiting to give my bi-weekly status reports to the President I reported to, there were photographic prints of Adams' work on the walls. The clean look to the photos calmed me before my meetings. In picking up "Ansel Adams at 100", I am reminded of a calm vision of beauty, in both words and pictures. Szarkowski's book is artistic and beautiful. First of all the book is well crafted with high quality pages that yield the most amazing pictures of the Adams collections. Secondly, the photos, especially of Yosemite, show an almost spiritual bent to them. I found myself looking carefully at both the sweeping measures of the photos, the granduer, and suprisingly, the sweet simplicity of a tree, a mountain, a leaf. It is Adams' mastery of focusing on the simple yet at the same time utterly complicated subject that makes you appreciate his clarity. Thirdly, the excerpts of Adams' vision and life lend to the book in giving the reader another overview of this work and life---especially how that led to his interests, his almost driven focus. All in all, it's a beautiful book, richly photographed and written, and elegant in both presentation and subject. Well worth the price.

This book is another lesson from John Szarkowski on how to write about the ineffable. However, it is a catalog of a show that is simply beyond description and contains much that is not in the book. Do not buy the book as a substitute.As a catalog it is good preparation for the show, even for this reader who saw Eloquent Light in 1963 and has been making photographs for 40 years in same locales as Adams. You won't find any massage for Zone-Heads, little Sierra Club poster art and almost no view camera cult food at all. Instead there is one powerful illustration after another of the evolution of an artist. Szarkowski uses his erudtion to place Adams in the art history of his time and the developing culture of the West Coast of which he was a part. He opens many many subjects and leaves us to flip through the book for illustration. He always raises more questions than he answers. He is a great teacher and has made sense of the nonsense about Adams that has accumulated over the years. Anyone with a pulse should be stimulated to see the show and investigate Weston, Strand, Stieglitz and others as well.There is one understandable omission from the book that should have been in the show. There is none of Adams' color work in either. In the book "Ansel Adams In Color" are a couple of color plates done at the same time as some of the black and white images used in current show and catalog to illustrated Adams' style. The color plates show dramatically how Adams turned a three dimensional landscape into a powerful two dimensional graphic work of art. They also show those who have not been here just how dramatically colorful it is. In a very real sense, Adams had to overcome the color to see his subjects.Another major part of the show that had to be omitted is the entire first room containing the works of other artists of Adams' time. Works of Marin, Hartley, O'Keeffe, Dove and several other of Adams' contemporaries and friends are the context in which he worked. Readers can look them up if they can't come to the show.Szarkowski is at his best in this book in comparing Adams with Weston. I know of no other historian who so clearly shows what each was after and how these two artists and ultimately friends sometimes fed on each other. Szarkowski shows their portraits of each other to punctuate their differences. It is much more effective in the book than the show where the point is lost in the scale and depth of the presentation.Finally, Szarkowski does justice to the network of friends, patrons and institutions that made California's art Californian. Any art historian or photography teacher must read this book. Above all, use it to prep for the show. Then heed Mark Twain's caution and follow his example. Bring an extra sweater to San Francisco and see the show, and like Twain, buy a round-trip ticket.

This book is the official catalog for the traveling show in honor of Ansel Adams' birth in 1902 that just opened in San Francisco and will travel through Chicago, London, Berlin, and Los Angeles before closing in New York late in 2003. I cannot remember a finer catalog for a photography show. The show's images were selected by John Szarkowski who is the director emeritus of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. In selecting images for the show, he emphasized both what he thought was Ansel Adams' finest work, and his work that looked best in printed form. So the images provide room for an outstanding reproduction, and that's just what the book's publishers have provided. The edition itself comes linen bound and in a matching linen slip cover. The pages are all of the highest quality heavy cover stock. The tritone printing is exquisite, limited only by the negatives and the current state-of-the art in printing. There is also a superb design. The works are sized to be in proportion to each others' negatives. Where images play off of each other, they are placed next to one another or on facing pages. Where that sort of conversation isn't possible, you see one image per two open pages. Unlike most of Ansel Adams' books, this one is on oversized pages so that there is the possibility of seeing the details as Mr. Adams intended them to be seen.A nice bonus is that each book comes with a frameable tritone 13" X 11" print on heavy cover stock with fascimile signature by Ansel Adams and a blind embossed seal of the Ansel Adams Trust of Aspens, Dawn, Dolores River Canyon, Colorado, 1937 . . . which is also reproduced in the book. It is the image of aspens that you probably know best from Mr. Adams' work. The essay focuses on two things: (1) The question of whether the photographer brings order to nature (as Edward Weston suggested) or simply sift its out (like gold dust from gravel in a stream) as Ansel Adams seems to have done. (2) A brief biography of Ansel Adams emphasizes his life as an art photographer and his early parallel interest in piano. Since the book is for a show, it would be inappropriate to try to cover much more. I was disappointed, however, that more of Mr. Adams' many letters were not included. The main drawbacks of this book for most people will be that it is selective and narrow in focus. Many people will mistakenly think that this book is intended to be the ultimate biography and reproduction of his photographs. That work remains to be done. I shiver to think what that will cost us to purchase! You will get a taste of his many different nature and landscape shots, but not all of your old favorites or as many of any type as you would probably like. You will also yearn, if you are like me, for an essay that paid more attention to his efforts in conservation.Of the 114 plates in the book, I found 27 to be outstanding to an extraordinary degree for my taste. Not surprisingly, seven were from Y