New discovery: Ansel Adams' urban landscapes of LA

[John Brownlow]

So it seems the old duffer wasn't just interested in photographs of Yosemite and moonrises.

A fascinating discovery, the story of which is documented here:

americandigest.org/mt-archives/006189.php

Flickr set of all the photographs:
tinyurl.com/hfmew

Excerpt from the essay:

"I DON'T RECALL WHAT I WAS SEARCHING FOR when I came across the Ansel Adams
photographs of Los Angeles at the beginning of World War II, but I don't think it was a
handsome rendering of Half Dome or a Moonrise in New Mexico. It was something much
more gritty. On reflection, it might have been photographs of my original elementary school,
Benjamin Franklin in Glendale. In any case I was running a search in the Los Angeles Public
Library's immense online collection of photographs when something in a record caught my
eye, the name "Ansel Adams." The image attached to this record was of a parking lot with a
cars jumbled together around a prominent No Parking sign..."

[tim atherton]

cool - Ansel Adams looks much more like Robert Adams!

[paulr]

see? all that time he was photographing yosemite, he was just waiting for someone to build some strip malls so he could finally get serious.

[julian_4860]

I suppose you could say that all that 'sunrise over...' was to pay the rent and this is what he really wanted to do...

[Brian Vuillemenot]

I can just picture Ansel riding around LA in a pimped-out Hummer, sporting some dope bling-bling... that would be da bomb.

[Kirk Gittings]

These leave little doubt as to where his real talent lay.

[Randall]

...and I placed the bowler's slacks in zone 3. My Wratten #12 filter would have helped clear the smoke, but I had left it on the diner counter at Lucille's. I reached for my Dagor 12 inch...

I love it. The double exposure made my day.

[John Brownlow]

I really can't be bothered with Ansel's landscapes (so sue me) but I always had a soft spot for his self-deprecation. He was a self-described klutz prone to double exposures and knocking things over. His technical writing is the best though.

[Walt Calahan]

And for all the Boy Scouts out there, I once met a former editor-in-chief of Boys' Life Magazine who said he hired Ansel Adams to do mnay of the "western" assignments for the magazine back in the 50s and early 60s.

Imagine summer camp with Ansel Adams!

I wonder if he taught Photography Merit Badge?

[Richard Boulware]

After looking over all of these pictures it is safe to say that these are some of the most poorly conceived pictures I have seen from Ansel. As Kirk Gittings said above, "These leave little doubt as to where his real talent lay." But the question is then, did he have real talent? Nearly every one of these negatives shows an leaning horizon (and not as Winogrand would later us it as a compositional element) and is structurally unbalanced. It could be said that the urban environment was not where he was comfortable photographing, but it can also be said that a competent photographer should be able to make a successful photograph no matter the subject.

I believe Ansel considered himself a modernist, but these pictures show little regard for the interaction of forms in space that the modernists held paramount. Take, for instance, the side view of the Van de Kamp Bakery. The man walking on the right side of the frame was going to move into the road and create a pattern of lights and darks, and the car looks as though it is about to turn the carner and leave an open view of the wall. Those two things are fairly minor compared to the empty space made by the sky on the right. It could be balanced by simply putting the windmill dead center in the frame (which would have made for a more interesting arrangement of lines in the street. Or, he could have stood somewhere else.

I am hard pressed to find a good picture among the whole lot.

I think he could have learned a great deal from Walker Evans.