Ansel Adams is the "brand" that nearly all my high school photo students already know when it comes to fine art photography. I like to shock them by saying he is not as significant artistically as his contemporaries like Edward Weston, Minor White or Imogen Cunningham. Though all photography is documentation, Adams Work as a whole "Adamizes" the lanscape with "Wagnerian" style and lacks real depth of vision. I have to confess, after seeing many Adams prints over the years, the only one that really moves me is a landscape from Manzanar, "Mount Williams, The Siera Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1945."
I feel Adams' contribution is mainly technical. He is a giant for codifying Minor White's esoteric Zone System and puting it in a form that left brain types can relate to, thus creating a tradtion that continues. However as a artist, he falls short of many others. Adams does best when his subject matter is already amazing and beautiful, then he applies his signature filtration and exposure and development techniques to transform the place stylistically in operatic proportions. You could confine Edward Weston in your back yard for an hour, and he would make an image you never anticipated because he would "see" this environment through his unique personal vision. Adams would dissappoint you unless you already had a magnificent feature for him to "Adamize."
Adams is responsible for the "limited edition" print model being appropriated as the prime commercial model for phography in the fine art world. I think this is a shame. Photography was potentially a truly "democratic" art medium where images could be widely reproduced and distributed at very low cost compared to other two dimensional art forms. Adams deserves a lot of credit for championing photography as an art when the art world rejected it totally. Showing that photography had commercial viability helped create a market for the medium. Adams went so far as to punch holes in some of his negatives to assure collectors that these images could not be printed beyond their stated edition. This act horrifies me and may have killed the the possibilty for photography ever fulfilling it's unique "democratic" potential if not for the internet, which now makes any images made availble to all who can access a terminal.
Adams helped the Sierra Club make it's strongest, most visceral, appeal to the American government and it's people by showing what few had seen, and what would be lost forever, if the National Parks were not created to preserve it. This is a noble cause and a great accomplishment on it's own and enough to make Ansel Adams a revered photographer, but this is a two edged sword. By creating these special grand places, every other place is less, by definition, and so we are free to develope and exploit them commercially, as long as the pinnacle of nature is preserved. I imagine that there are precious Adams prints adorning the walls of some corporate polluters boardrooms were few can see the irony.*
So Adams is important, even essential, to photography, but his status in name recognition and as a blue chip investment do not make him important as a visionary. The accessibility of his vision may bring many into an appreciation of photography as an important medium and, with time, many of those might come to see there is more depth possible in photography than Adams ever touched on. That would be a good thing.
