This is a guest post by Houston photographer David McClain.
More than is good for me, I’m sure, I’ve been glued to news about Ukraine. My days and thoughts have been filled with the normal day to day, but also images of massive urban destruction, orphan toddlers, heavy weapons on city streets, dead soldiers, nuclear plants under attack (live in my living room!). I flee the conflict by studying the flock of red-bellied woodpeckers in the back yard or walks in the nature trails of Memorial Park. Today it was reshelving my library books: always a good time! Half the time I may actually make room for volumes in my overstuffed shelves, but the pleasure is in the other half, as I leaf through the books I’ve purchased but not yet read. I get to sample a bit from each volume, congratulating myself on acquiring it or trying to remember why I did. Such was my lot when I got to a black and white landscape photograph on page 49 of American Photographers and the National Parks, R. Cahn and R. G. Ketchum (National Park Foundation, Viking Press 1981). The photograph is by Ansel Adams, Rocky Mountain National Park, Never Summer Range, circa 1941, Colorado.
While the book comes with an attractive slip cover, it isn’t valuable.
But the prints are absolutely gorgeous and any photographer would be happy to have their work so printed and presented. Here’s an example by William Henry Jackson, an extraordinary landscape photographer.
But here on page 49, is a cartoon. A world upside down. It’s a landscape photo by Ansel Adams, and while the cloud and sky are perfectly exposed, the rocky landscape of the Never Summer Range has been reduced to thick and thin black lines and
blown out whites with a touch of a stolid gray, much like a landscape in DC Comic’s Sergeant Rock or a Roy Lichtenstein, but without the colored ben-day dots. Well, I tell myself, shrugging at the shoddy printing, I didn’t pay much for this book anyway.
But this is the only photo like it in the book. And that date — 1941. To be making landscape photos in the national parks while it was nineteen hundred and forty one.
Was it a printing error? Certainly Adams, who was as well-loved for his darkroom skills as his compositions, would have given the publisher a perfect print, properly exposing the entire landscape, and certainly not allowing any blown-out highlights! But on this print, this object before me, it clearly didn’t look like Adams at all.
And that’s when it gets interesting. I should look online for examples of this photograph and easily find out if Adams wanted it printed this way. But in the moment, I liked the story there on the page in front of me and developing in my head. It’s 1941, the cusp of the United States’ entry into World War II and Ansel Adams is making a photograph out in the middle of nowhere. Surely, his mind would have been aware of the enormous war already waging in Europe as he drove1 deeper into the remote national park in Colorado. Newspapers and radio airwaves were already full of war reports and domestic squabbles over whether to enter this “European war.” Surely Adams knew that the world was upside down: fascism was prevailing; urban war was destroying communities; political, racial, ethnic, and every other kind of cleansing was being openly deployed while the US maintained its neutrality. In the Roosevelt - Churchill letters, it is clear just how deep the divide was, how clearly only something as foolish as Pearl Harbor would bring the US into the war before Britain fell.
So I could google it. I’m no photo historian and certainly no expert on Ansel Adams but I do recall a friend saying that Adams was more politically active than I suspected, active in areas other than the environmental. But was he making a political statement in Rocky Mountain National Park, Never Summer Range? And while I’m at it I could ask “what did Ansel Adams do during the war? Did he make any statements about war in 1941? What do I have to google to find the interesting books and articles that must have been published about the impact of war in 1941 on photographers and artists working in the United states at the time and I could google a ton of other things but I would probably get distracted by pictures like this before I could even finish this thought:
I could find out if this object before me was a shoddy print job by the Viking Press in 1981 or I could think about Adams making the sky perfect and the land a shallow representation of itself, a nude landscape devoid of life or other earthly signs. A comment on world affairs and a stand-in for the absurdities of landscape photography in the midst of industrialized inhumanity. Who knows?
How do artists deal with war? I fear this is going to go on for a while. There will be profound resistance within Ukraine whether or until the government falls and there will be more atrocities against citizens we already shudder to imagine. Consumed with this, I imagine the atrocious “war art/peace art” I could make, and I congratulate myself for not even trying. But I am seeing the world through the war. I’m seeing images on my TV and computer of urban spaces that look familiar, true. Places I might have been or seen or wanted to see. And in these places: bodies of old men and young Russian soldiers; tanks; heavy military equipment that the journalists must tell us about (so we all contemplate the horrific potentialities of the thermobaric weapons we see rolling in convoy towards Kyiv and other cities). Then later, as the war has gone on, whole families lying in public spaces, dead. Heroic acts. Raw and pure emotion from so many. I see this and know I won’t make any art about war. But I can see it (and if I can’t see it, I can project it) in others’ art.
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He almost assuredly drove. He famously built a sturdy deck on top of his cars “From cavernous De Soto limousines to hokey Ford Woodies and latterly Chevy wagons that would now be called SUVs” to hold him and his large format camera equipment while working.