Ansel Adams: Legacy, Zone System, and Conservation Photography

Introduction

"Of all the great black-and-white photographers, Ansel Adams was the blackest and the whitest." — Kenneth Brower, 2002

Today, Ansel Adams is widely regarded as the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century and is perhaps the best-known and most beloved photographer in the history of the United States. As a firm testament to his talents and innovations, the popularity of his work has only increased in the years following his death in 1984 (Szarkowski 1–2). Adams's most important work concerned the last remaining vestiges of untouched wilderness in the nation, particularly the national parks and other protected areas of the American West; in addition, Adams was an early and outspoken leader of the conservation movement (Szarkowski 2). This paper provides an overview of Adams and his historical significance, followed by a discussion of the medium he used and the time period in which he worked. An analysis of the historical and artistic influences on Adams is followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.

Historical Significance of Ansel Adams

The superlatives simply fly when discussions of Ansel Adams arise. While the photographer had his critics, by and large the American public loved the man and his work. "Anyone can understand the art of Ansel Adams," Brower notes, "whose images just knock one over. What role does that leave the critic?" (133). Anyone who has seen an Adams photograph — which is to say virtually everyone — is immediately impressed by both the quality of the composition and the clarity of execution. According to Fischer (1996), "The photographs of Ansel Adams stress self-realization through identification with a natural setting" (365).

Adams has left a profound legacy by generating continuing and renewed interest in the conservation of wilderness areas in the United States, as well as by introducing innovations into the field of nature photography. For example, in his essay "Layers: Looking at Photography and Photoshop," Flagan (2002) points out that "anyone familiar with photography, and especially the large-format variety, will perhaps recognize immediate echoes of another process, another system, invented many years prior in the 1940s by Yosemite legend and modernist photographer extraordinaire, Ansel Adams" (10).

The importance of Adams's work can also be seen in the popularity of his photographs that toured the country on his 100th anniversary in 2002. His photographs are widely regarded as being "the most natural and timeless there is, both in terms of subject matter, which helped spawn the National Park system, and interpretive vision, expressively channeled as an inner, personal style" (Flagan 12). Likewise, Brower (2002) notes that as far back as 1955, Adams "was even then recognized as the foremost landscape photographer on earth" (132).

Such praise is not without foundation. Adams was an early proponent of achieving maximum optical clarity through his association with the f.64 group — f.64 being the smallest available aperture, which provides the largest depth of field — and he advanced the lens-based component of photography to its sharpest and clearest rendering to date, thereby ensuring that everything from near to far in his photographs was resolved with the same crisp, distinct detail (Flagan 12).

The photographic process that most fully defines Adams's technical legacy is the Zone System. This technique was based on the principles of densitometry — used here in relation to the optical density of photographic negatives, sometimes referred to in earlier studies as sensitometry. Adams's Zone System, developed in collaboration with Fred Archer in the early 1940s, is a method that permits a photographer to coordinate exposure readings with exposure and development controls based on a pre-visualization of the final photographic print (Flagan 11).

The first step in understanding and using the Zone System involves dividing the continuous, analog grayscale of a photographic print into ten discrete units, or what Adams termed "zones." In order to maintain a separation of zones from other measurements, such as exposure readings, Adams assigned them Roman numerals, thereby capturing the entire range of tones from the deepest black — where all the silver in the paper has been exposed — to the brightest white — rendering nothing but the paper base — on a scale of 0 to X (Flagan 11).

The Zone System and Photographic Innovation

When taking photographs in the field, photographers using the Zone System would set up their equipment before a selected scene and perform a series of meter readings. They would then envision what the desired final print should look like and make the exposure accordingly. According to Flagan, exposures would normally be made for the deepest shadow area with detail, which would fall on Zone III in Adams's system, and then the negative would be developed with contraction or expansion of the highlight values — in essence controlling contrast through changes in development time. The photographic result, as Adams himself noted, was not primarily concerned with the "reality" of the scene: "Many consider my photographs to be in the 'realistic' category. Actually, what reality they have is in their optical-image accuracy; their values are definitely 'departures from reality'" (Adams, cited in Flagan 11).

One of the more interesting aspects of this contribution is the manner in which it foreshadowed the introduction of digital photography at the close of the 20th century. Following its introduction in 1941, Flagan suggests that it is impossible to consider photography an exclusively analog operation today, since every photograph conceived using the Zone System was pre-visualized based on a table of ten discrete values. "It was composed and manufactured according to these ten units, and largely presented as the creative result of applying various zones to elements of the original scene," he observes (Flagan 11).

Adams was also not above revising the various elements of his photographs in response to criticism. As Brower explains:

"The public has always liked Ansel Adams, even if the critics have not. In this 1978 McKinley, Adams simply darkened the shadows on the peak but not beyond the tonal range the eye accepts. . . . The 1978 print is not just more dramatic; it also conveys more information. Adams's darkening of shadows accentuates the topography of the mountain, sharpening the knife-edge ridges, bringing out the massif's third dimension." (133)

The importance of this approach to contemporary photographers cannot be overstated and remains a vital component of his legacy. According to Flagan, Adams was the first photographer to take landscape images and reduce them into their respective visual components using his Zone System. This approach seemed to be the catalyst that moved photography from the realm of merely reproducing what the camera saw to one where the photographer became the composer as well. In this regard, Flagan notes that with Adams's Zone System, individual values were complemented "without risk of retracing the Pictorialist's penchant for broad painterly strokes. But consider also that there is no detail without value. Every object in a photograph is composed of contrasting changes in tone: optics simply enhance their borders, just like an aperture makes any differentiation possible" (12).

Therein lay the genius of Adams: "Without these gradations, photography is only light-sensitive materials responding to an absence or excess of light, with all the gray values, divisible to infinity, of the Zone System found in between" (Flagan 12). These gradations are clearly visible in Adams's work — in "Moon and Half Dome," for example, and in "Trees, Stump, and Mist, Northern Cascades" — both gelatin silver photographs held in the Ansel Adams Gallery.

In his essay "From Aesthetic Education to Environmental Aesthetics," Fischer (1996) suggests that it was this ability to move fluidly between environmental and aesthetic criteria of value that "led Adams to a photographic style which recalls the great stylists among realist painters of nineteenth-century America" (366). Likewise, environmentalist William Turnage believed there was a clear association between Adams and the Rocky Mountain and Hudson River schools of landscape painting, a connection further supported by photography critic John Szarkowski, who stated:

"Adams' photographs are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition. . . . It does not seem likely that a photographer of the future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust and belief that Adams has brought to it." (cited in Fischer 366)

Conclusion

The research showed that Ansel Adams remains preeminent among early American photographers decades after his death, and his legacy appears to be permanent in this regard. The research also showed that today, Bill Gates owns the electronic rights to all of Adams's works: on April 2, 1996, Corbis Corporation, owned by Gates, reported that it had signed a long-term agreement with The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust for the exclusive electronic rights to works by the photographer (Batchen 6).