Ask the Curator: Paul Roth, Curator of Photo/Media Arts Responds to Student Questions about Ansel Adams

1. Did he (Ansel Adams) hear music inside his head while he photographed
nature since he played the piano as a kid?

This is a great question. Ansel Adams answered this same question when he was asked it late in his life. He said that he did often hear music inside his head while he was photographing. As you know, Adams was trained as a classical pianist, and he continued to play the piano throughout his life. He loved classical music. He often used musical terms to describe his photography: he would compare dark areas of the photograph to low notes, and bright highlights to high notes. He compared the making of a black and white negative to the writing of a musical score, and he said that making the print was like a performance of the score. When he made his final prints with an enlarger, he always used a metronome -- a musician's device for keeping rhythm -- instead of a conventional darkroom timer. Adams said that he sometimes heard the French composer Chopin in his head when photographing, and other times he would think of the German composer Bach. He mentioned other composers as well.


4. Was seeing the mountains love at first sight for him?

Maya, Ansel Adams went to Yosemite National Park in northern California when he was 14 years old on a family vacation, and he fell instantly in love with the wilderness area he found there. Yosemite includes mountains and lakes and trees and rock formations, not to mention the animals that live there, so it was more than just the mountains that gave him "love at first sight." Being there and finding something spiritually powerful in the natural world changed his life completely. From the time he was 14 to the time he died at the age of 82, he went to Yosemite at least once every year. And of course he found his career there, since mountains became the subject for his best photography.


7. The way that the pictures were taken made it seem as thought he was in
the sky, did he ever take photographs from an airplane? [Corryne G., age 13]

Corryne, Adams did make some photographs from a plane late in his career, when he was 65 years old. He was working on a commissioned project for the University of California in Berkeley, and he tried many new things for this assignment, since he had a lot of freedom to experiment. He photographed through a microscope, and he took pictures of surgery in an operating room. And he took some pictures from an airplane. Of course he had taken pictures from high up before, when he would climb mountains with his cameras. But photographing from a plane was a new experience for him.


8. How did Ansel Adams overcome all his difficulties and problems?

This is a very interesting question, though it is not easy to answer since I didn't know him personally. Adams was an incredibly optimistic person, had tons of energy, and worked hard every day. People who knew him marveled at how hard he worked, and how he never seemed to get tired. You may know people like this. Adams certainly had problems in his life, just like you and me and everyone else. He had some very rough periods. But he always tried to work his way through them as opposed to letting himself get down for too long. His passion for nature, and his belief that he could help other people come to know and love nature, made him push through the bad times.


12. Why did he only take pictures in black and white? (Courtney D.)

This is a good question, Courtney. It may seem strange now that someone would make only black and white pictures, and in the future we will see less and less black and white photography. But when Adams first started taking pictures at the age of 14, black and white photography was the only option available to him. It would be many years before color film was manufactured. In fact, Adams DID make color photographs during the second half of his career, mostly when he was making commercial photographs for some of his clients so he could make a living. But he didn't think color was the best choice for him, since he had learned to express himself -- and done so very well for such a long time -- in black and white. For him, black and white CHANGED things in a creative way when he made photographs of the real world: as an artist he thought in black and white and shades of grey as opposed to colors.


13. Are his children still alive? (Mashae M.)

Mashae, both of Adams' children are still alive -- and they're not even that old! Both his son and his daughter live in California, where they were brought up. I was very lucky to recently meet his daughter Anne when she came to the Corcoran to see the exhibition! She brought a number of friends with her on a Saturday a few weeks ago. She looked just like the pictures her father took of her when she was younger, and she was very nice.


16. How did he plan out his photos?

This is a great question and goes to the heart of how Adams made his pictures. Adams is famous for what he called "visualization," which is the process by which a photographer employs vision, imagination, and technique in order to conceive and realize a photograph. Most people with a camera don't think very carefully about how the picture will look before they click the button -- they just point the camera and let it capture an image of what is in front of it. Adams wanted to control how his pictures would look so that he could get something extraordinary. He developed his skills with the camera and in his darkroom so he could predict and control the way his scenes looked, with colors translated into shades of grey. Then, as he became more experienced, he learned to see almost with different eyes, so he could predict how his camera and his materials would render the world. The, once he could imagine his pictures and make them the way he wanted, he went beyond a straightforward depiction of reality to express something special about the world. He needed to do this to convey his emotions when he was out in wilderness: an ordinary picture would only show how something looked, and not how he felt about it. He wanted to capture how he felt, and hopefully inspire people to go out in nature and have similar feelings of awe and wonderment. So he looked for things that were unusual, like beautiful and subtle changes in the light, or dramatic shapes in the mountains, that would make his pictures more interesting.


20. Why was it so foggy when he took pictures? [Whitney E.]

Well, Whitney, it isn't always foggy in his photos! Adams made pictures in all kinds of weather and all kinds of light. But he did like dramatic weather because it lent drama to his pictures. Fog, rain, snow, and clouds all change the light and change how we see trees, mountains, water and so on. Adams really didn't photograph places so much as he photographed the experience of events in nature. And weather, such as the fog that settles in a valley, appealed to him because it was something different, something unusual. Adams was trying to convey how special nature could be, and so he looked for special moments rather than ordinary ones.

Ask the Curator

Corcoran ArtReach at THEARC
Fall 2007 Semester, September 17 – December 10
Photographic Explorations

Questions for
Paul Roth,
Curator of photography and media arts,
Corcoran Gallery of Art

While viewing the Ansel Adams: Documentary Film, students at THEARC were asked to write 5 or more questions, comments or thoughts they had about the film.

A few of those questions are listed below. On this blog, curator Paul Roth, will respond to five questions from the list:

1. Did he (Ansel Adams) hear music inside his head while he photographed nature since he played the piano as a kid?

2. Did he ever take photographs of natural disasters? [Courtney D., age 13]

3. Did he take photographs of animals? [Courtney D., age 13]

4. Was seeing the mountains love at first sight for him? [Maya S., age 10]

5. Did Ansel Adams take any art or photography classes?

6. Did he ever fall while he was climbing? [Mashae` M., age 12]

7. The way that the pictures were taken made it seem as thought he was in the sky, did he ever take photographs from an airplane? [Corryne G., age 13]

8. How did Ansel Adams overcome all his difficulties and problems?

9. Was he born near Yosemite Park?

10. How do you take a picture like Ansel Adams?

11. What type of camera did he use?

12. Why did he only take pictures in black and white? (Courtney D.)

13. Are his children still alive? (Mashae M.)

14. Did he have any help or did he take pictures alone. (Suzanna)

15. What places did he travel to in order to get the pictures? (Suzanna)

16. How did he plan out his photos?

17. What year was he born and what year did he die? (Essence D.)

18. How did Ansel Adams get to the top of the mountains?

19. Did he start out like us with the Value Studies? [Tanae B.]

20. Why was it so foggy when he took pictures? [Whitney E.]