Ansel Adams

mural-sized, signed with a stylus on the image, flush-mounted to Crescent illustration board, signed, titled, and dated in ink on the reverse, framed, 1927, probably printed in the 1960s

Acquired from Michael Shapiro Gallery, San Francisco, early 1990s

San Francisco, The Friends of Photography, Ansel Adams Center for Photography, Defining Modernism: Group f.64, October - December 2001

Tampa, Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Classic Images: Photography by Ansel Adams, May - July 2011

Other prints of this image:

Andrea G. Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs  (New York, 2007, p. 35

Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light, Photographs 1923-1963 (Sierra Club., 1963), dust jacket and p. 45

Ansel Adams (Morgan & Morgan, 1972), pl. 8

Ansel Adams, Yosemite and the Range of Light (Boston, 1979), pl. 54

Ansel Adams and Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston, 1985), p. 77

James Alinder and Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Ansel Adams: Classic Images, The Museum Set (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1985), pl. 2

Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, eds., Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916 - 1984 (Boston, 1988), p. 31

Therese T. Heyman, ed., Seeing Straight: The f.64 Revolution in Photography (The Oakland Museum, 1992), p. 44

Karen E. Quinn and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Ansel Adams: The Early Years (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1991), pl. 6

Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: A Biography (New York, 1996), facing p. 106

Karen E. Haas and Rebecca A. Senf, Ansel Adams in the Lane Collection (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2005), pl. 5

David Travis and Anne Kennedy, Photography Rediscovered: American Photographs, 1900-1930 (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979), pl. 156

This impressive and dramatic print, on paper with a surface sheen, is flush-mounted to Crescent illustration board. As is typical of prints that are flush-mounted, there is some wear at the edges, with small attendant chipping. There are two small circular areas that are slightly darker in the sky area and in the upper portion of Half-Dome; these appear to be due to spotting on the negative,or some other aspect of the process, and are not physical features of the present photograph. When examined in raking light, the following are visible: small areas of original retouching; a one-inch linear indentation that does not appear to break the emulsion in the upper central portion of the print; and a barely noticeable 3-inch diagonal soft linear mounting crease at the upper right corner. None of these detracts from the pleasing and attractive appearance of this photograph. The photographer wrote his signature, title, and dates on the reverse of the mount in ink on October 28, 1983.
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This mural-sized print of Adams’s Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, is believed to be the largest version of the image to appear at auction.  Adams typically made limited numbers of his photographs in the mural format. Yet, while there are several extant mural-sized renderings of such signature images as Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, and Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, mural prints of his iconic Monolith are surprisingly rare on the market.  A large print of the image was notably absent from the two significant groups of Adams murals that have come to auction recently, Photographs from The Polaroid Collection (Sotheby’s New York, June 2010) and Photographs by Ansel Adams from a California Collection (Christie’s New York, April 2008). 

In his Autobiography, Ansel Adams recalls in detail the circumstances leading up to making this photograph, and describes that event as a ‘personally historic moment in my career’ (p. 76).  In taking this image, Adams considered not only how best to capture his subject with his camera, but, for the first time, anticipated how he wanted the finished print to look.  This pre-visualization led him to select a red filter, which he knew would render the sky a deep black, and to adjust the exposure accordingly.  Adams wrote that, with Monolith, he ‘had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject looked in reality, but how it felt to me’ (ibid.).  In Monolith, Adams crystalized his conception of visualization: the process by which a photographer determines specifically how the different tonal values of a scene in nature will be rendered in black-and-white on photographic paper.  This would become fundamental to his approach to photography for the rest of his career, and was the basis for his teaching of the Zone System. 

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, has proved to be one of the most durable images in Adams’s oeuvre.  After its debut in his 1927 Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras portfolio, Adams revisited the image throughout his career, and printed it in a wide array of formats: from the select number of small-format prints made in the 1920s and 30s, to the medium-format print in his 1960 Portfolio III, to the mural-sized print in his 1963 exhibition, The Eloquent Light.  It is perhaps best-known today through the 20-by-16-inch format prints he made in his Carmel studio after 1960.  The rare mural-sized print offered here presents a dramatic interpretation of this important image, and demonstrates the endurance of Adams’s artistic vision and technical virtuosity.