Ansel Adams

mounted, signed in pencil on the mount, the photographer's San Francisco letterpress label (BMFA 4), titled in ink, on the reverse, 1932, printed in the 1930s

Gift of the photographer to a friend, late 1930s

Sotheby's New York, 17 April 2002, Sale 7777, Lot 20

Ansel Adams, Yosemite and the Range of Light (Boston, 1979), p. 16

Andrea Gray, Ansel Adams: An American Place, 1936 (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1982), pl. 3

Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, eds., Ansel Adams: Letters & Images (Boston, 1988), p. 96

John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at 100 (Boston, 2001), pl. 62

Andrea Gray Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (New York, 2006), p. 77

Ansel Adams: Sierra Nevada/The John Muir Trail (New York, 2006), pl. 3

This early print, with a wide range of warm, rich gray tones, and on paper with a slight sheen, is mounted on slick white board. It is in generally excellent condition. In high raking light, faint silvering is visible, as well as 2 small and very faint soft creases that likely occurred during mounting. They are at the left side and do not detract from the attractive appearance of the print. There is faint scattered foxing on the mount recto and on the verso, where it is slightly more prevalent. There are also some tiny losses of the top paper ply of the slick white mount at the lower right corner. Karen Haas's and Rebecca Senf's book, 'Ansel Adams in the Lane Collection,' publishes the most comprehensive list to date of the studio stamps and labels Adams used throughout his career. The authors' assessment of the use dates of San Francisco Label 4 on the reverse of this print is 1936 through 1944.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

This classic view of Yosemite was one of a collection of scarce, early Ansel Adams photographs sold in these rooms in 2002.  Consigned by a California gentleman who had known Adams in Yosemite in the 1930s, these photographs were the first significant group of early Adamses to appear at auction.  They sparked new interest in Adams’s early prints and set unexpected price levels for this work.

Adams’s early photographs can be a revelation to those accustomed to the larger format prints of his later career, prints known for their bold, contrasting tones of stark black and white.  The early prints are intimate in scale and longer in tonal range.  The experience of the landscape in these small photographs is perhaps more subtle, but it is nonetheless extraordinary.   As John Szarkowski described another early Adams in his Ansel Adams at 100, the photograph displays a ‘perfection of the tonal scale, which binds the picture together almost in a membrane of light.’

The image offered here was among the photographs included in two of Adams’s earliest one-man shows: in his 1933 exhibition at the Delphic Studio in New York and in a legendary show at the great Alfred Stieglitz’s American Place gallery in 1936.   Adams called the American Place show ‘the most important one of my life,’ and within the photographer’s oeuvre there is a special cachet to any image chosen for that exhibition.  Like the present print, all of the prints at American Place were mounted on white Bristol board, slick on one side and matte on the other; and like the present print, most carried on their reverse the Adams studio label designed by Lawton Kennedy.  The size and presentation of the Yosemite offered here confirm that it is of this ‘American Place’ generation of prints from the later 1930s, and, like all of the photographer’s prints from that time, it is exceedingly rare.  In 1982, Andrea Gray Stillman attempted to re-create the American Place show with the very prints that had been on view, but she was unable to locate an original exhibition print of the image offered here.