 |
||
| Ansel Adams stands as one of America's greatest landscape photographers. Born in San Francisco, Adams was trained as a concert pianist. His first photographs were made at the age of 14 using a Kodak Brownie camera during a visit to Yosemite Valley with his parents. This visit strongly influenced the course of Adams' life. By age 30, he had changed his path and chosen a career in photography. Adams' photographs are elegantly composed and technically flawless. Ansel Adams proved a tireless investigation of the methods of photography, pioneering a method called The Zone System, a technique which allows photographers to translate the light they see into specific densities on negatives and paper, thus giving better control over finished images. Throughout his career, Ansel Adams became well known for the clarity of his instruction and his hands-on workshop approach to the medium. Ansel Adams advocated the role of photography as a fine art, inspiring new ways of seeing and communicating. He influenced generations of photographers though his teaching, practice, and publishing endeavors, and has gained standing as one of America's best-known photographer. Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, was made on an excursion to what Ansel Adams called an “extraordinary area.” Georgia O'Keeffe, a famous American painter, and Orville Cox, the guide, were engaged in conversation when Adams made the image. Upon writing about this photograph, Adams remarked, “I remember that we watched a group of Navajos riding their horses westward along the wash edge, and we could occasionally hear their singing and the echoes from the opposite cliffs. The cedar and pinyon forests along the plateau rim were gnarled and stunted and fragrant in the sun. The Southwest is O'Keeffe's land; no one else has extracted from it such a style and color, or has revealed the essential forms so beautifully as she has in her paintings.”  (For Grades 6-8) What do the expressions on both Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox's faces reveal? What effect does the angle of this image have? How would the photograph change if Adams had made it differently? What type of mood is evoked in this image? Do you think Adams successfully captured the mood in this photograph? Why or why not? Where do you think they might be standing? What do you think they might have been talking about? |
||
| |
||
  |
||
Ansel Easton Adams American, 1902-1984 Georgia O’Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona Gelatin Silver Print, ca. 1937 Collection Museum of Photographic Arts Gift of Weston Gallery Inc. 1985.036.001 © Trustees of The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust |
||
© 2005 CARE All rights reserved