Celebrate 100 Years of National Parks with Ansel Adams’s “Early Works”

On August 25, the National Park Service (NPS) will turn 100 years old. Resource Travel already suggested one way to celebrate that birthday, and here’s another: going to the Ansel Adams exhibit at the historical Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY.

Ansel Adams was a legendary photographer throughout most of the previous century, well known for his black-and-white prints of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park. During his lifetime, he received many awards, including the Conservation Service Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as well as receiving honorary doctorates from Harvard University and Yale University. He was also inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2007.

Adam’s rather uncommon “early works” exhibit, on display through September 18, focuses on his masterful small-scale prints from the 1920s into the 1950s. In this time period, the photographer’s technique evolved from the soft-focus, warm-toned, painterly “Parmelian prints” in the 1920s, to the f/64 school of sharp-focused photography that he co-founded with Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham in the 1930s, and, after World War II, toward a cooler, higher-contrast printmaking approach.

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.
Photograph by Ansel Adams. Vintage gelatin silver print.
Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.
© 2015 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Monolith, the Face of Half-Dome, Yosemite National Park, California 1927.
Photograph by Ansel Adams. Vintage gelatin silver print.
Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.
© 2015 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

The Sentinel, Yosemite Valley, ca. 1923.
Photograph by Ansel Adams. Vintage gelatin silver print.
Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.
© 2015 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

The exhibition is sponsored in part by The Morgan McReynolds Group at Morgan Stanley, NYCM Insurance and The Clark Foundation. The exhibition is organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions. Support was also provided by a Market NY grant through I LOVE NY/NewYork State’s Division of Tourism, as a part of the Regional Economic Development Council awards. Photographs belong to the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.