"As a younger person, I was an Ansel Adams superfan. For most of a decade, I used the annual spiral-bound Ansel Adams engagement calendars to keep track of meetings and activities. I'd pore over the beautifully reproduced images from my desk in New York City and pine for the faraway landscapes pictured therein - many of them in California, my home state."
"The exhibit focused primarily on photographs Adams took in Los Angeles on assignment for Fortune magazine during the lead-up to World War II. This is not a body of work that Adams is known for, nor one he favored. The image from the series he reportedly liked best framed a cemetery statue of an angelic figure against a forest of oil derricks. Judging by the images shown at Westmont, Adams seemed drawn to those derricks."
"The result is a stunning body of work that I only recently discovered. Published in a book titled Born Free and Equal and featured in an exhibit of the same name, the photographs were not well received at the time. Nevertheless, Adams believed them to be among his most important work, highlighting the dignity and ingenuity of the imprisoned, who were, in his words, "suffering under a great injustice.""
Ansel Adams became known for iconic landscape photography and gained wide exposure through annual engagement calendars. He photographed industrial Los Angeles for Fortune before World War II, often framing oil derricks against civic scenes and amusement parks. Adams volunteered to document daily life at Manzanar, where over 10,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated, and was granted access to the camp. The resulting photographs were published as Born Free and Equal and were initially poorly received, yet Adams considered them among his most important work for highlighting the imprisoned people's dignity and ingenuity. During a Manzanar visit he photographed Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, while internees lived nearby behind barbed wire.
Read at High Country News
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