Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams has so profoundly shaped the way city folks look at nature that it's easy to look at his photographs and see only cliches: romanticized panoramas and misty vistas. But there's more to the landscape photographer and his pictures.

In the last project he completed before his death, Ansel Adams, probably America's foremost and best-known landscape photographer, sifted through his life work and selected 75 pictures to serve as a visual autobiography. The photos, which he wanted displayed in museums as a complete set, will be on exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art starting Saturday. "Ansel Adams: Classic Images, the Museum Set" will remain through Feb. 10. Adams took more than 40,000 pictures in his lifetime.

On Aug. 4, "Ansel Adams at 100," the first major retrospective of the photographer's work since his death in 1984, opened at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. Curated by John Szarkowski, director of the department of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991, the show commemorates Adams' centennial (he was born Feb. 20, 1902) and offers a fresh interpretation. Now as famous for posters and postcards as for fine art, Adams is something of a pop figure.

Late one afternoon, after a frustrating day spent trying to photograph a cottonwood stump along the Chama River, Ansel Adams was driving back to Santa Fe when he noticed the moon rising over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Pulling his station wagon off the road, Adams unloaded his 8-by-10 view camera and hastily calculated the proper exposure. From over his shoulder, the setting sun lit the snowcapped peaks and glinted off the white crosses of a cemetery in the foreground.

Ansel Adams was a naturalist; Paul Strand a populist. Adams looked for the ravaged young tree to mark the incidental passage of time in the forest; Strand looked to an abandoned cluster of bicycles in the woods. Two such images in the stunning exhibition "Paul Strand and Ansel Adams: Native Land and Natural Scene," at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, point out the similarities and differences between these two great masters of 20th-Century American photography.

RICK NORSIGIAN discovered the object of his obsession one sunny Saturday seven years ago at a garage sale. A painter for the Fresno school district by day and inveterate antique buff the rest of his waking hours, Norsigian was combing through suburban castoffs when he came across a time-weathered wooden box. The crate was heavy with old glass-plate photographic negatives.

Interior Secretary Donald Hodel rappeled and climbed the granite cliffs of Yosemite National Park and later took time out from recreational pursuits to dedicate a mountain peak in honor of photographer Ansel Adams. Rappeling--rapidly descending cliffs while using a pulley-like device--and rock climbing were new to the secretary, but he declared the day "a great experience."

1994 * Ansel Adams owns Yosemite Valley, photographically. His pictures have made this California landmark an international destination for tourists, many of whom, like the one seen here, are photo hobbyists trying to make Ansel Adamses of their own. The picture of this sightseer was made by a streetwise New York photographer who was prospecting for a different kind of gold, trying to stake his own claim on Yosemite.