Saturday Morning Musings - Ansel
I’ve mentioned to several folks that I think one of the best buys for photographic prints are the Ansel Adams Special Editions Photographs available from the Ansel Adams Gallery at Yosemite. If you’re ever at Yosemite NP, you really should visit the gallery. There, you can see some lovely, large Ansel Adams prints, and images from others as well. And you can examine and buy the Special Edition Prints right there.
While the Special Edition Prints are not strictly Ansel Adams prints, they are his images from duplicate negatives, printed on traditional silver-based gelatin-fiber paper, done by Alan Ross, a former assistant to Ansel, using Ansel’s print recipe. They are lovely. And while inflation has taken its toll on the cost of a print, they’re still reasonable and definitely a bargain when compared to prints done by Ansel himself. I think the only real value competition is (or at least used to be) through the National Archives, where you could get prints from US government negatives from such greats as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. In any event, the Special Edition Prints are the closest I’m likely to ever owning a real Ansel Adams print.
Ann and I own two of them. And they are a consistent source of inspiration. We’ve usually hung them up in our offices, so we look at them every day. Here’s Ann’s print, already up in her office (Yes, the wall paper needs . . . to go. I would have also included the big Cow painting on the wall to the left, but then the Ansel print would have been too small. Guess we have to save that shot for a story on the house.).
Mine, fortunately, is leaning against the wall right behind my laptop monitor in my office - so I see it every day too. I say fortunately because it hadn’t dawned on me when I set it behind my computer (below where I was going to hang it) that the sun might hit the wall in the late afternoon though one of the skylights in my office. Yes, it does, so I would have had to take it down anyway. I’m still working on where I can put it so I can look at it, without the sun ruining it. For now, I just look around my monitor a few times a day to . . . enjoy it.
We came across the Special Edition prints on our first trip to Yosemite. After much deliberation, we purchased the Tanya Creek, Dogwood, Rain print and did our best to keep it from getting smashed during the remainder of our trip.
Of course my hand-held photo of it doesn’t do the print justice. The light in the image is magical. The dogwoods seem to rise from the surface of the print and you can hear the creek flowing. It is a masterpiece of image making and doesn’t rely on the grand landscape to take your breath away. It’s a Bach cello suite, not a Tchaikovsky symphony or Wagner opera.
I’ve included the stamp they place on the matting that indicates that it is from the Yosemite Special Edition collection. I thought I should let you know, lest anyone think we own original Ansel prints.
A couple of years later Ann gave me another one - Dogwood Blossoms. She really is the best gift giver ever! This one is even more intimate and reveals what is so special about silver gelatin prints. The petals look soft and, more importantly, glow in the image
So, what started this blog post was the fact that I had a fairly slow morning. By slow I meant my weekend to-do list was only about a dozen items long and, best of all, I got my work done early on Friday and knocked off a handful of those items from my weekend list before I called it a day. Saturday morning found me building an Ikea cabinet to store our photo paper in the print room and when I was done with that . . . well, I felt no guilt at all for taking some me time.
For reasons I’ll go into detail about in another post, I decided I’d take my coffee, pull a book out of the library, sit in a comfortable chair and enjoy some images. The book I selected was . . . well, you can see for yourself.
It’s a nice and big book, so you can really examine the images. The printing is not too bad either, though not as good as some of the other Ansel books. Still, it contains a wide variety of his images, which is always a pleasure to explore. Ansel is not just a master of grand landscapes, he’s a master of photography.
So imagine my surprise when I turned a page and looked at this spread!
Perhaps some images are just meant to be seen together!