Product Description

This surprising book presents 50 beautiful full-color images by the great American landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, marking the first time that a significant body of Ansel Adams' color work has ever been published.

Ansel Adams began to photograph in color soon after Kodachrome was invented in the mid-1930s, and shot more that 3,000 color images during his lifetime. Very few of these photographs, however, were published or exhibited. As Adams remarked late in life after observing the advances in color printing techniques, "People are skeptical about my thoughts on color. I do not blame them, as I have protested it and have not shown my color pictures. I feel the urge now and wish I were sixty years younger!" The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, working with the distinguished photographer Harry Callahan, decided to share this remarkable body of work, reproduced in accordance with Adams' exacting standards, through state-of-the-art color imaging and printing technology.

These images, accompanied by an introductory essay by James Enyeart and a selection of Ansel Adams' thoughtful, often contradictory writings on color photography, add a fascinating new dimension to Adams' enduring legacy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #734113 in Books
• Published on: 1993-10-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 132 pages

From Library Journal
Although he claimed he did not like color photography, Ansel Adams nonetheless produced a highly accomplished if relatively small body of color work, selections of which are gathered here. These scintillating images embody the same refined detail and delicacy of light seen in Adams's black-and-white photographs. In fact, the subtleties of light so often overwhelmed in color photography are clearly evident here. Characterized by restrained, at times understated hues, the photographs are consistently remarkable. They have been ably selected and arranged by editor Callahan and are further enhanced by an informative introduction by James L. Enyeart. This beautifully designed and printed work, which is well worth its price, should be considered a standard title in all public and academic library collections. Highly recommended.
- Raymond Bial, Parkland Coll. Lib., Champaign, Ill.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Adams died in 1984, still planning a book on color photography, a topic that he had wrestled with since the 1950s and that gave him profound discomfort. He allowed that were he a young photographer in the 1980s, he'd work in color, yet in the last letter quoted herein he confessed, "I don't like photographic color. . . . It is not my dish of tea!" In other remarks, he was more analytic about color's challenges. Mostly, he regretted lack of control over intensity and hue, which afforded him no way to transform color as he transformed and exaggerated tonal values in black-and-white. For Adams, black-and-white was an abstract medium and color was inseparable from banal realism. He also sensed in himself a lack of "color imagination," the quality that distinguished the work of his colleague and friend Eliot Porter. He was right, yet he produced 3,000 color transparencies, most as tests for Kodak or for 1940s and 1950s commercial jobs. Eminent color photographer Harry Callahan culled 59 landscapes from this work for this album, which thoroughgoing photography collections will want in order to document Adams' beliefs about color photography and as testimony to the problems color has presented as a creative medium. Gretchen Garner

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 ardent environmentalists.

James Enyeart is the Director of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House. Formerly director of the Center for Creative Photography, he is the author of Decade by Decade: 20th Century American Photography(NYGS, 1989).

Customer Reviews

Excellent Pictures - Still Prefer The Classic Adams "B&W"
Interesting read - originally found in the public library. Wanted a copy for my collection but still Prefer The Classic Adams "B&W"

Insight About Color Photography For Ansel Adams Fans
As a photographer with over 50 years of experience with cameras, I found the color photos by Ansel Adams interesting and enjoyable to peruse. But, the most important aspect of this book for me were the quoted passages from Ansel's letters and other writings regarding the challenges of making meaningful and art-level color photographs. Ansel envisioned the coming world of color photography and even foresaw the post negative film era that might happen as he wrote many years ago when color slide film was his choice for its stability and vividness. But, when he wrote his book, the color films then available to the photographer did not enable the degree of post-camera manipulation and fine tuning of photographs that we enjoy today with digital photography.

interesting book on photographic philosophy - not a coffee table book for Adams fans
This book is all about the text. It is a book on photographic philosophy, and can't be reasonably judged as a book of images by Ansel Adams evangelists like some of the above reviewers. He is dead now, and surely wouldn't mind the fact that some of his pictures have been used to stimulate discussion and thought regarding photography and/or art. He would not have proudly displayed this work based solely on his personal opinions. That doesn't mean it is bad, and it doesn't mean it is exploitive for publishers to show it to us now. It is just an interesting book, and I imagine that it would be even for someone who is not a photographer.