The Bookshelf #12 - Ansel Adams’ Yosemite
Ansel Adams’ Yosemite - The Special Edition Prints
Foreword by Pete Souza
Published by Litte, Brown and Company
Available on Amazon from £38.00
I should probably hang my head in shame about the fact it has taken me so long to write about one of Ansel Adams’ books in my bookshelf series.
For those of you who are new to landscape photography and haven’t heard of Ansel Adams, the thing you need to know about him is that he is the Godfather/Grandfather/Don/Grand Mufti of landscape photography. This is a pretty widely held opinion and it’s one I subscribe to. It might even do him an injustice to refer to him by any of those titles, we should probably roll them all into one. Then we might start to get close to stating his importance. He’s the reason we photograph landscapes in the reason so many of us do.
There are (probably) hundreds of books of Adams’ photography, books about his photography and books about the man himself. I am a bit sad that I only own two of them; Yosemite and his autobiogprahy.
Few photographers are associated with a place as much as Adams is with Yosemite. His dramatic black-and-white images helped shape the way generations of photographers see the landscape: not just as scenery, but as something powerful, fragile and worth protecting.
Yosemite gave Adams everything a landscape photographer could dream of: towering granite cliffs, shifting weather, deep valleys, waterfalls, forests and light that seemed to change by the minute. Photographs such as Monolith, The Face of Half Dome and his many studies of Yosemite Valley show his extraordinary control of tone, contrast and composition. They are not simply records of a place; they are interpretations, full of mood and reverence.
What makes Adams’ Yosemite work so enduring is the sense of patience behind it. He understood that great landscape photography is rarely about simply arriving somewhere beautiful and pressing the shutter. It is about waiting, studying the light, understanding the land and knowing how to translate what you feel into a finished image.
This is a beautifully made book. It’s hardback with lay-flat binding, which is a really nice given that none of the images are spread across the double page. What this does mean though, is you spend more time with the images and less time fighting with the book so that you’re able to see the photos.
I suppose the only thing that bothers me about this book is its size. It’s a nice size hold in your hands or to lay on a table (other flat surfaces are available, but at 8 inches high and 10 inches across (per page), I just wish were a bit bigger. Adams was famed for shooting with a great bag large formate camera and a bigger book may have allowed us to enjoy the images more like he intended.
For photographers today, Yosemite remains almost mythic because of Adams. His work reminds us that landscapes are not just places to photograph, but places to respect. Whether you shoot on film, digital, large format or a phone, there is still a lesson in his Yosemite images: slow down, look harder, and let the landscape speak.
Yosemite is published by Little, Brown and Company and is available on Amazon from £38.00
Before you leave, check out some of the other entries in my bookshelf series by clicking the links below:
