Nature’s Wonders in Focus: Ansel Adams’ Masterworks exhibition in Shreveport

With an artist’s eye, his camera as canvas, and light for paint, Ansel Adams traversed America to render scenes of natural grandeur, whether soaring or subtle in size and beauty. His dramatic black-and-white photographs of Yosemite and the American southwest became icons of both 20th-century photography and environmental awareness.

Throughout his career, Adams’ enduring photographs proselytized for environmental preservation. In the late 1960s, he gained both commercial and artistic success after decades spent capturing America’s natural beauty through the lens. Ansel Adams became a household name like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses, and Frederic Remington. He helped lift the photography medium up from its snapshot reputation, while his photographs were seen as synonymous to the stewardship of America’s land and the need for conservation efforts.

Not long before he died in 1984, Adams paused to reflect on the best times of his life as an artist during his 82 years. He selected 75 moments in which he accomplished his best work.

Those moments, all snaps of a shutter, captured on film the images he selected to comprise what he called “The Museum Set.” Of that number, 48 images are featured as part of the exhibition, Ansel Adams: The Masterworks, on view at the R.W. Norton Art Gallery and Gardens through December 31.

The Norton, which boasts 24 galleries, is located at 4747 Creswell Avenue in Shreveport amid 40 landscaped acres with more than 15,000 plants, canopies of hardwoods and pines, streams, and waterfalls. Within these galleries are seven centuries of European and American art. There is no charge for events or admission to the museums, its grounds, and beautiful gardens.

“We are delighted to have this wonderful exhibit,” says Jerry Bloomer, secretary of the board and public relations director for the R.W. Norton Art Gallery. “Ansel Adams’ works portray some of the most incredible landscapes in America. Adams was once quoted as saying, ‘Sometimes I do think I get to places just when God is ready to have somebody click the shutter.’ These are images that speak of place and the importance of place, and that is an ideal that people in our part of the country instinctively understand.”

The exhibit also marks the return of Adams’ work to the Norton. The first showing, held in 1992, drew an attendance record of over 8,500 visitors. This was followed by Ansel Adams: Celebration of Genius in 2004-2005, which brought 6,500 viewers during its three-month run, according to Bloomer.

The photographs come to the Norton from the collection of the Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding, California. With the exception of one portrait, all are framed, gelatin silver prints of images Adams captured across the nation, from Hawaii to Massachusetts. They also span much of his life. The San Francisco native was still a teenager when he snapped his oldest photograph in the exhibit, “Lodgepole Pines: Lyell Fork of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California.”

A pianist who taught himself to play at the age of 12, music became the main focus of Adams’ youth. For the next dozen years, the piano was his primary occupation, and by 1920, it was his intended profession. He ultimately gave it up and decided to turn his attention to photography in the 1920s, but the discipline, structure, substance, and exacting craft of playing the piano ultimately impacted his visual artistry and later influential writings.

In the 1930s, Adams formed Group f/64 with photographers Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston. The company was dedicated to photography as an art form, which in turn created the Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography.

Adams had achieved far more by the late 1960s, when he took another trip to Yosemite and focused on a landscape that became “Eagle Peak and Middle Brother, Winter, Yosemite National Park, California,” which is also in the exhibition.

In the decades between those two images, the nation saw a depression and economic booms and busts. Meanwhile, Adams, who worked for the Sierra Club (and later became a board member), kept his camera turned on the enduring natural beauty of America. He didn’t achieve financial success until late in life.

During his last 20 years, Adams spent much of his time teaching photography and writing about environmental issues. He wrote many technical works and encouraged museums and universities to add photography departments. Then and now, his name signifies photography as art, photographs as visual essays, and a life as an artist. ✦