Ansel Adams: But is it art?

His best-selling photographs have graced countless calendars and chocolate boxes. Yet Ansel Adams ? who was born 100 years ago ? pushed back more creative frontiers than it is fashionable to admit. Kevin Jackson celebrates an underrated revolutionary

Thousands upon thousands of people simply adore Ansel Adams (1902-1984). But then, thousands upon thousands of people adore Snoopy, too, and to admit in loftier-browed circles that you share – if with certain reservations – the well-nigh universal enthusiasm for Adams's nature photography is roughly equivalent to confessing that you find Charles Schultz's insouciant beagle irresistibly cute. Such snobbery is, to be sure, grossly unfair (to the beagle as well as to the photographer), but the cultivated sneers aren't hard to understand. Throughout the affluent world, and above all in the United States, Adams's wilderness studies are the staple of the gift store rather than the cutting-edge art gallery, and for every person who has ever seen an Adams print at close range there will be umpteen who know his work only from coffee-table books, glossy calendars, postcards and other studiedly tasteful bric-a-brac.

More than any other photographer, Adams has become established as the one you can take home to show the folks, with perfect confidence that he will ruffle no feathers, spoil no one's supper, so that the mass reproduction of images he made – mostly before 1949 – has grown into the kind of booming industry usually felt to be incompatible with photographic talents of the first rank. I must confess to having aided and abetted the process myself: a couple of years ago, hard pressed to come up with a small thank-you present for an elderly American lady of conservative tastes and politics, I ended up buying her... an Adams desk calendar. (Well, it was hardly going to be a Mapplethorpe.)

Nor is the prodigious wealth of his estate based solely on the mass market: the fraternity of collectors has also helped to ensure his place in the record books. By 1950, Adams had become the most famous of all landscape photographers, a reputation which remains without serious rival today, 100 years after his birth. By the time of his death in 1984, he was also acknowledged as the creator of the single most lucrative image in the history of photography – Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941): a photograph which earned him at least $500,000 (£325,000) in fine-print form alone.

The escalating value of a Moonrise print is also a handy index of the sudden boom in the photographic collectors' market from the late 1970s onwards. In the late 1940s, Adams would sell a 16-by-20 print for just $50 (£32); in December 1979, an auction at Sotheby's in New York set three sales records when it brought in a successful bid of $22,000 (£14,000) for one of the same prints – the most ever paid up to that point for a work by a living photographer, the most ever paid for a 20th-century photograph, and the most for a work on paper. Since then, the Moonrise edition has gone on to make a vast sum in the resale market – a modest estimate being more than $25m (£16m).

All of which might point to little more than herd instinct and chronic poor taste among rich collectors, and a fortune made on the back of unfashionable inoffensiveness. There is something in this: considered cynically, Adams's photographs of the American West are spiritual cousins to those Impressionist studies of rural France so beloved of Japanese financiers. You don't need a higher degree in fine art to find them easy on the eye. A less cynical comparison might stress that neither set of works seemed so immediately appealing to their earliest audiences, and if we find them agreeable now, it is because others once did some hard looking for us. The Impressionists once seemed wild and crazy; Adams once seemed chilly and ultra-formalist.

Most importantly, the general popularity of both sets of work is – I would argue – founded on what President George Bush might call "misunderestimation". Paul Fussell, one of the wittiest and most mordant cultural critics the US has produced since the age of Thorstein Veblen, has pointed out the paradox that the United States, home to some of the most violently radical and uncompromising movements in modern art, from the Black Mountain poets to the Abstract Expressionist painters, is also home to a sizeable population of ultra-genteel art consumers – Adams' key constituency – who flee in horror from the merest hint of overt ideological content, whether of left or right.

The key word there is "overt". If you look at the work of Adams's contemporaries and near-contemporaries – Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Paul Strand – you can't help noticing one big difference. They shoot people, Adams doesn't. What's more, they tend to shoot people in extreme circumstances, people such as sharecroppers and economic migrants, and to treat those subjects with a sympathy that has obvious social implications (however much leftist critics of later generations may have carped and moaned about their reactionary sentimentality). By severely purging all human presence from his landscape work, Adams is also emptying it of ideology.

Or so it looks at first sight. On closer inspection, Adams's unpeopled work starts to yield up all manner of different human content, and shows itself to be implicated in all manner of broader issues, from ecology to modernist aesthetics. If this claim seems far-fetched, simply consider Adams's profound significance for the conservation movement, and his direct influence on US environmental debates. As his earliest biographer, Nancy Newhall, pointed out back in 1963, Adams knew perfectly well that it had been a portfolio of photographs by Carlton Watkins that had helped persuade Congress to put aside Yosemite Valley as a protected area in 1864 and, eight years later, that it was another set of photographs, this time by William Henry Jackson, that persuaded them to establish Yellowstone as the first true national park.

Adams's own photographs had comparable impact: in the long term, the most significant monument to his time on earth may well be the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area, 229,334 acres of raw landscape added to the John Muir Wilderness and Yosemite National park, which was sponsored in 1984 by two Californian senators, a Democrat and a Republican. For 37 years, Adams served as a director of the Sierra Club, and put his imagery directly in the service of that body. His contribution to environmental awareness is beyond calculation, though one can point to specific triumphs, such as his role in curbing the environmental hooliganism of President Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt, a man who, convinced that apocalypse was just around the corner, concluded that we might as well burn up the Earth while we had the chance.

Well and good, replies the unbeliever: granted that Adams fought the good fight as an environmentalist, granted even that his photographs have been put to telling use as environmental propaganda... does this really add up to more than the claim that he was a nice guy who made nice pictures? Answer: not on its own, no; but then we have said little, so far, about his place in the history of American image-making.

As Tate Britain's recent, excellent show on the American Sublime demonstrated with exemplary clarity, landscape painting in the New World was always charged with extra-natural content. In very broad strokes, the tale goes something like this. The Jeffersonian democratic ideal is, at heart, a pastoral ideal: the pioneering gentleman goes out into the wilderness and turns it into a civil, productive Arcadia. In the American paintings of this phase, the human presence looms large, either with substantial figures in the foreground surveying their territory with justified pleasure, or with the incontrovertible evidence of industry, trade and art – ships plying their wares along the river, charming, Edenic vistas that hark back to Poussin and Lorraine.

Then – broad narrative strokes again – comes the epic push west. Mapping and charting are crucial parts of the westward expansion, with the artists coming up swiftly from the rear, and with the change in national focus comes a corresponding spiritual change. The rich young American men who would once have made the European Grand Tour now go on Western tours instead; and the nation's wise men, Thoreau, Emerson and the other Transcendentalists of New England, sing the praises of the solitary soul encountering the ennobling wilderness, while deploring the effeminacy of city life. (Admittedly, Thoreau's own experiment with the wilderness at Walden Pond was pretty much a backyard exercise, and he was slightly alarmed by his time in the Maine woods, but it's the thought that counts.) Painters take up and amplify the Transcendentalist theme. Now, canvasses are painted on a giant scale, the shock of wilderness hits the spectator squarely in the eye, while the human presence is either erased or shrunk down to minuscule proportions.

Sound familiar? So it should, not merely because Adams was the direct visual heir of those original Western painters, but because he imbibed the teachings of Emerson and Thoreau with his baby pap. It cannot be over-emphasised that, for Adams as for so many romantics before him, solitary confrontation with unworked nature was a religious experience. As he put it in 1920, when he made his first photographic expedition into the High Sierra, "I look upon the lines and forms of the mountains and all other aspects of nature as if they were but the vast expression of ideas within the Cosmic Mind... The world has suddenly opened up to me with tremendous and dazzling effect." Miss the fact that Adams is a mystic, and you miss the heart of his enterprise.

You also miss the point of his notorious technical perfectionism. Naive photographers tend to assume that if they went on holiday to Yosemite with their SLR or neat new digital job, all they would then have to do is find the right view, wait for the right time of day, hit the button and, bingo, their very own Ansel Adams. What they forget is (a) that Adams was less interested in preserving what the unaided human eye can record than with bringing out visual qualities that it is ill-adapted to perceive on its own (we don't, for instance, see in black and white); and (b) that those same visual qualities were, in Adams's view, the formal route back to a mystical experience.

There is a famous story of how his first "true visualisation", as he called it, came about almost in a trance state. The year was 1927, and he was trying to shoot an area of Yosemite known as the Half Dome. He set his camera up with an 8.5in lens, then covered it with a standard K2 yellow filter to tone down the bright sky. Something nagged him, though, about the inadequacy of the image he knew would result, and so on impulse he substituted a red filter (to be exact, a red Wratten No 29 F) and increased the exposure 16-fold. Developing the plate that night he felt that, after years of frustration, he had finally preserved the emotional experience of his wilderness vision.

From this point on, Adams became a zealot of the darkroom, the filter, the exposure time, taking such fanatical and protracted care of the whole process that he was doing well to complete as many as 12 images in a year. Trained as a pianist, he elaborated a complex and quasi-musical system of tonal values: the so-called "Zones". It is characteristic that when, in 1932, he joined forces with some like-minded friends (Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham et al), they should have chosen a technical term for their group identity: f/64, the exposure which gives the greatest depth of field and clarity of focus to a picture. One of the small ironies of Adams's career is that, though a devotee of depth of field, he hardly ever used that particular setting.

Various as their talents were, the one thing all members of the group had in common was a commitment to "straight photography" – an emphasis on clarity of line and form appropriate to the camera age, as opposed to the crepuscular, Rembrandtesque compositions of the older practitioners who called themselves "pictorialists" and were known to Adams and his colleagues by the less flattering term "fuzzy-wuzzies".

The f/64 group was an avant-garde and, like all avant-gardes, its members were destined to be rejected by their juniors. Serious complaints about Adams's work became audible after the Second World War, and grew louder with the 1950s and 1960s, when the likes of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and William Klein came to the forefront of critical attention. Their work was variously rough-edged, jaundiced, improvised, harsh, neurotic, obsessive and unsettling: the polar opposite of everything Adams had accomplished, and, to the post-war sensibility, an exhilarating novelty. The task of photography, critics now tended to say, was more to shock and dismay than to celebrate and sooth, and if the ideal of "beauty" was to be evoked at all, it was more a question of discovering a fascination in the discarded or grotesque than in traditional canons of wholeness, harmony and radiance.

It's a fair cop, as far as it goes. Klein, Frank and company are still very much critically OK, and will no doubt remain so as long as there is no such thing as a Diane Arbus wall calendar or desk diary, with freak-of-the-month displays. But there is, too, such a thing as the philistinism of the elite: a refusal to see the virtue of something popular simply because it is popular, or to take pleasure in a conventionally beautiful image simply because, like an Adams photograph, its beauty is conventional, "unchallenging", merely pretty.

At the very least, Adams deserves the tribute of open-mindedness and informed criticism; and one anecdote that should always be a small part of the whole story is that which tells how the critic Beaumont Newhall, idly flicking through a magazine, unexpectedly came across an Ansel Adams picture which made him literally fall back on the couch in surprise, murmuring that Adams must surely be the greatest photographer ever.

and to admit in loftier-browed circles that you share – if with certain reservations – the well-nigh universal enthusiasm for Adams's nature photography is roughly equivalent to confessing that you find Charles Schultz's insouciant beagle irresistibly cute..

These are the same "loftier-browed" snobs who say that Norman Rockwell was not a "real" artist too. It's a pity they can not enjoy art for the sake of enjoyment. A Crucifix in a bottle of urine.....now that's real art....

Of course you do realize that there is a good reason why The "Arts Community" needs the NEA etc. Because basically nobody buys the crap they put out.

So Snoopy isn't cute?

If I read the article correctly, and I'm not sure that is the case, I would have to disagree on that one point. Snoopy is cute.

On everything else, I agree. Cheers to the author, who pens what he thinks without regard to how many friends he'll make in doing so..

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