Realism With Reverence

No artist has pictured the magnificence of the western states more eloquently than Photographer Ansel Adams. This summer thousands upon thousands of tourists will follow Adams' well-beaten trail up & down the National Parks, fixing the cold eyes of their cameras on the same splendors he has photographed--and hoping, somehow, to match his art.

It is art, not artiness; Adams shoots straight, as these pictures of Utah's Capitol Reef and Yosemite's Vernal Fall show. Painting, he thinks, has a bad influence on photographers, leading them to romanticize what they see. Adams shuns trick effects. Objectivity, reinforced by every technical resource of the medium, is what he strives for. Adams has great reverence for the world he photographs, and the combination of realism and reverence is the measure of the man and of his work.

A lean, black-bearded man of 49, Adams has roamed the mountain country most of his life. The pioneer U.S. Photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) strongly influenced his art, helped make it known. Like Stieglitz, Adams is a brilliant teacher and technician who believes that photography can be as pure an art form as any other. But, says he, "Creation within the strict limitations of the medium is the basic law of pure photography as in all the other arts."

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