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Examples

The Making of 40 Photographs

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By Ansel Adams

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On Sale
May 30, 1989
Page Count
180 pages
Publisher
Ansel Adams
ISBN-13
9780821217504

A MASTER CLASS WITH AMERICA’S MOST CELEBRATED PHOTOGRAPHER
 
“How did you make this photograph?”
 
This is a question that Ansel Adams was asked repeatedly throughout his lifetime. In Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Adams shares the circumstances surrounding the creation of many of his most celebrated images. Each classic photograph is superbly reproduced and accompanied by an entertaining and informative narrative that combines his own reminiscences of people and places with precise recall of technical details and aesthetic considerations.
 
Readers will be fascinated by the personal side of the text, which includes a great deal of history and anecdote, including appearances by Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Weston, and other notable figures such as Edwin Land of Polaroid. Pondering these essays conjures the sense of standing by Adams’ side during some of the most pivotal and profound creative moments of his life in photography—a master class with the legendary artist.
 
The specific technical information on camera and lens, filters, exposure times, developing, and printing provided in each example illustrates his approach and methods, and will help amateurs and professionals alike to advance their photography. Through this case study approach, Adams’ philosophy of craft and creativity unfolds; his credos of visualization, image management, and the Zone System are demonstrated; and the colorful story of a lifetime devoted to photography is revealed.

Genre:

  • “Adams explains the why and how of some of his most famous photographs. Reading the book is like taking a short, intensive course with Ansel himself.”
    New York Times
  • “[T]his is the one we've all been waiting for. This is the stuff that can be very helpful to real people. . . . Whether you're a professional photographer, an advanced amateur or simply an appreciator of fine art, Examples is a must.”
    San Jose Mercury News
  • “This volume zooms in on the man himself, the ardent conservationist photographer, who here explains his craft, shares his knowledge, entertains with anecdotal experiences and enlightens one with his philosophy.”
    San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
  • “Seldom is photography written about in Churchillian accents, simple and resonant, but that's what Adams does in this delightful auto-exposure of the best of his life work. The author recalls technical, logistical and aesthetic adventures that led to his own favorite pictures, many of
    which, of course, are now classics of the art.”
    Publishers Weekly
  • “As he talks about his work, you'll find Ansel the most informative and entertaining of guides whose insights shed light on the ultimately mysterious process by which creativity and craftsmanship fuse to produce a work of art.”
    Popular Photography

Formats and Prices

Price

$60.00

Price

$75.00 CAD

Format

Trade Paperback

Format:

Trade Paperback $60.00 $75.00 CAD

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Ansel Adams

About the Author

In a career that spanned six decades, Ansel Adams was at once America’s foremost landscape photographer and one of its most respected environmentalists.

In Ansel Adams at 100, John Szarkowski notes that Adams’s role in the history of photography goes beyond his achievements as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. As a leader in the study and appreciation of photography as an art, he played a major role in establishing the first department of photography in an art museum, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the same department that Szarkowski led from 1962 to 1991). Moreover, as a tireless advocate for improving the reproduction of photographs in books, Adams “badgered and cajoled his printers and platemakers” till they had “achieved in ink an unprecedented degree of fidelity to the chemical print.”

Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, “Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save,” Szarkowski writes, adding that “Ansel Adams’s great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world.” Szarkowski dates that experience to the early 1920s and a camping trip in the High Sierra. As Adams later recalled, “I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light…. I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks.”

Commenting on this moment of vision, Szarkowski writes, “One might guess that Adams spent the next quarter century trying to make a photograph that would give objective form to the sense of ineffable knowledge that on occasion, in his youth, inhabited him in the high mountains. Yosemite and the Sierra gave him not only his principal subject, but also the experience that provided the basis for a useful artistic idea: ‘The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor.’”

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