Seeing Nature: Ansel Adams in the Human and Natural Environments of Yosemite (Portz-Prize-Winning Essay, 2004)

Wallace Stegner once hailed the legacy of Ansel Adams as bringing photography to the world of art as a unique "way of seeing." (1) What Adams saw through the lens of his camera, and what audiences see when looking at one of his photographs, does indeed constitute a particular way of seeing the world, a vision that is almost always connected to the natural environment. An Ansel Adams photograph evokes more than an aesthetic response to his work--it also stirs reflections about his involvement in the natural world that was so often his subject. Audiences experiencing his work participate in a deliberate conception of wilderness, the national parks, and especially Adams's ultimate inspiration, Yosemite. Much has been made of Adams the "legend," the "master," and the great icon of creative photography, but this aggrandizing obscures the man behind a mask of greatness. While Adams was undoubtedly a master of both the art world and environmental activism by his middle age, during his youth he was a great equivocator. He bounced from school to school, from music to photography, from mountaineering to poetry. At different points in his adolescence and early adulthood, it seemed as if he might devote himself fully to any of these pursuits. Why then did he choose photography? Why did the natural world become the most recurrent subject before his camera? How did these choices influence Adams's cosmic vision of the natural world, a vision that would shape the minds of generations of Americans? The answer is a complicated one, with roots in family upbringing, economic realities, artistic philosophy, and personal ethics. His art emerged from a tangled maze of influences but was firmly rooted in the valley floors and mountain peaks of Yosemite National Park. Here Adams encountered a unique locale through which to define his relationship to both human society and the natural environment. He was able to do so because Yosemite was an amalgamation of two seemingly opposite settings, where wilderness and civilization, human intellect and the natural scene united in a distinctive mixture that maintained permeable boundaries and wary co-existence. From the parallel worlds of human and wild space, Adams synthesized his own vision of Yosemite--an image he popularized with generations of Americans. His photographic images of Yosemite, however, deliberately did not include the human element that had been so important in creating the man that Adams became. The tension between the Yosemite that shaped Adams and the image of Yosemite that he offered to the world is indicative of broader dichotomies in the way Americans intellectualize human and wild environments as separate spaces.