Ansel Adams--It's All About Tweaking

New York

This has been one of those weeks that I could do a commercial for the "I Love New York" campaign.

At the beginning of the year, as is my habit, I try to add something to my life that I think will be enriching and a stretch--in some area. This year, one of the areas was getting to know the Metropolitan Museum of art. So, when the calendar of events arrived sometime in December of last year, I sat down with my datebook, and added two gallery talks, lectures or exhibits per month.


Yesterday, I crawled across the threshold of my coop apartment door and the workman affixing the new door saddle ( we're renovating the building ), and set out across Central Park to the Met. It is always an amazing walk. The birds are different, the people are definitely different, and yesterday, the ballfields looked like a back to back Fields of Dreams.

The topic, Ansel Adams, was addressed by Andrea Gray Stillman, now 60ish who had been Adams' assistant in Carmel in the 1970s. Her knowledge of the man, his temperment ( humorous but very private with an exceptional gift for "seeing" ), and his love of the natural world was evident.

During the hour lecture to a full house of probably 500, I was most impressed with Ansel Adams' creative process. It wasn't just that he knew how to crop a shot, or the timing ( dawn and dust ) of great photos, or the time intensive process involved including dragging heavy equipment to sometimes remote sites in U.S. parks, like Yosemite, to get just the right angle, just the right composition.

The part that I found most enlightening, and, OK, metaphorical, was that Adams' real work happened in the dark room. It was there that he manipulated the negative until he got the result he wanted. It might have been a little more light in the sky or more depth in the scrub grass or more contrast between his famous photo, Autumn Moon, ( above ) in which he deepened the sky just below the moonrise to create the eerie look that has been published so often. Or the stunning view he preserved for us forever of Bridal Veil Falls that I've included in this posting.

So, it's not just about having talent and working hard. It's about the tweaking; the painstaking,sometimes inch by inch process of moving from good to great. Or in the real world of the day to day, knowing that if you've got a fairly good character foundation, are trying to do the good, care for those you love, always trying to move toward the light in a manner of speaking--that's probably not enough. Beyond that is the sweat, the trial and error, the risk taking.

The real challenge is in the tweaking.

MC