It is
surprising that someone like me who loves colors this much has an
intense obsession with black and white photography. Yet, I do. I
love anything that captures the Spirit.
The first time I looked at Ansel Adams's pictures, I got goose bumps.
I could literally feel the hair rising on my skin. It was that
powerful.
Ansel had captured the incomparable beauties of the American
landscape, showing also how man could be related to this magnificent
setting. To me, I am more wowed by the realization of how foolish we
are in our disorganization and misery, compared to this austere
beauty of God's Body-nature.
Ansel was trained to be a concert pianist, but later pursued a
career in photography instead. However this early discipline helped
him develop a meticulous approach to photography. There is a poetic
and musical quality in his pictures. Each element is uniquely
rendered and balanced, just as in music.
His images are powerful and immediate, carefully composed, full of
the most potent sense of atmosphere and symmetry. Whether it is the
majesty of form, the solidity of the composition...it is evident that
he understands his medium and he allows himself to be deeply
intimate with the wildness. He is able to capture the scene with
technical accuracy and present it in an expressive and emotional
state.
There is a unique sensibility in Ansel's pictures. They are flowing
in a tonal quality which embraces the sharpness, purity and clarity
ranging from intense black to purest whites, with luminous tonal
grays in between.
One of Ansel's technical masteries is acquired by the repetition of
the use of filters. His first breakthrough in these techniques came
during a trip to the Half Dome where he made a photograph which
would radically change his understanding of the medium. On his
arrival, he noticed that the face of the enormous granite rock was
entirely in shade and he was overwhelmed with an urge to photograph
the towering structure. He was aware that adding a K2 yellow filter
to the camera would make the sky a flat mid-gray, but felt that more
could be achieved to capture and emphasize the Dome's powerful
atmosphere, a brooding cliff framed in a dark sky. So he added a red
filter, which reacted with the blue of the sky to achieve a result
which made the sky appear more intense, almost black, and imparted a
brooding quality to the Dome, emphasizing its vastness.
Adams could not resist heightening the drama of the natural scene by
rendering the mountains an almost impenetrable black. The sky filled
with shadowy clouds. The range of the contrast in his images reveals
his superb sensibility; his photographs translate black, gray and
white into a full spectrum of vivid tones.
As to the portrayal of sunlight on water, Ansel managed that by
using a special lighting effect. He created a somber background upon
which the extreme opposite tone of the water is exaggerated. The
result is that the print appears luminous in tone and texture.
I have always believed that the mind, working at incredible speed,
is able to probe into the future as well as recall the past. Our
explorations of the past support the present, and our awareness of
the present will clarify the future. Photography is one of the means
that express this affirmation.
Intense beauty is liberation, which happens to Ansel Adams.
As in Ansel Adam's own words:
For the
fist time, I know what love is, what friends are, and what art
should be.
Love is a seeking for a way of life, the way that cannot be followed
alone, and the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. The
person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad
mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the
emotions that are within you.
Friendship is another form of love, more passive perhaps, but full
of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunder, clouds
and grass and the clean reality of granite.
Art is both love and friendship and understanding, the desire to
give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more
than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking
and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds
of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another
plane of the realities of the world, the tragic and wonderful
realities of earth and men.
As for me, I had some dreams that I saw endless oceans mounting,
layering with each other. My eyes stretched so far that I felt my
whole being was evaporating in the vast beauty. The Self didn't exist anymore.
There are no words to describe the ecstasy of being ONE with the
nature.
It is such a revelation that photography is a medium that helps us
connect to the highest being - God, the creator of beauty and
mystery.
ˇ@
