Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams: Early Works focuses on the masterful small-scale prints made by Adams from the 1920s into the 1950s. In this time period, Adams’ technique significantly evolved from the soft-focus, warm-toned, painterly “Parmelian prints” of the 1920s; to the f/64 school of sharp-focused photography that he co-founded with Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham in the 1930s; and, after World War II, toward a cooler, higher-contrast printmaking approach.

Several singular examples are included in this exhibition, including an extraordinarily rare print of Moonrise, Hernandez. It is one of the earliest extant; with its light gray (rather than deep black) sky with wispy clouds, it is almost “day and night” when compared to his much more common, much darker, printings from the 1970s and 1980s.

The exhibition is sponsored in part by The Morgan McReynolds Group at Morgan Stanley, NYCM Insurance and The Clark Foundation.