Ansel Adams 1902-1984

Carmel, Center for Photographic Art, Ansel Adams: From the Private Collection of Margaret Weston, July - September 1995

Monterey Museum of Art, Passion and Precision: Photographs from the Collection of Margaret W. Weston, January - April 2003

Other prints of this image:

Ansel Adams, Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography (How to Do It Series No. 8) (London and New York, 4th edition, 1948), p. 72

Bryan Holmes, ed., Poet's Camera (New York and London, 1946), pl. XXI

Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston, 1985), p. 33

James Alinder and John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams: Classic Images (Boston, 1985), pl. 7

Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (Boston, 1983), p. 32

Karen E. Haas and Rebecca A. Senf, Ansel Adams in the Lane Collection (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2005), pl. 19

20th Century Photography, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (Köln, 2005), p. 18

Adams made this image, which he called 'an isolated inspiration, free of any association in art that I knew about,' with a rose from his San Francisco home.  He immediately recognized that a north-facing window's light would beautifully illuminate the translucency of the rose's petals, but he had difficulty locating what he considered to be the appropriate background.  After trying a number of possibilities--books, bowls, pillows--he recalled a piece of weathered plywood that he had gathered as driftwood at Baker Beach.  Delighted by the relationship of the rose petal shapes with the plywood pattern, Adams set up his 4 by 5 view camera with an 8-inch Zeiss Kodak Anastigmat lens.  He had some difficulty with the depth of field and made six different exposures at different settings. The resulting successful exposure was that made at f/45 with a five-second exposure.  Adams wrote,

'...the macro-world (encompassed by the close-exploring eye) seems most favorable to the lens and to creative expression.  Most of my photographs made before 1930 were of distant grandeurs.  But as I learned the inherent properties of camera, lens, filters and exposure, I also gained the freedom to see with more sensitive eyes the full landscape of our environment, a landscape that included scissors and thread, grains of sand, leaf details, the human face, and a single rose' (Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, pp. 33-35).

Prints of this image, both early and late, are rare.   The present photograph is one of only six examples, in various states, that have been offered at auction in the past two decades.  The two early prints that have appeared at auction were sold in these rooms on 23 April 1994 (Sale 6551, Lot 144) and 17 October 2003 (Sale 7925, Lot 21).  Unlike many other popular Adams images, however, even later prints of Rose and Driftwood are scarce.