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DALLAS TOWNSHIP — Don’t be surprised if a visit to the art galleries at Misericordia University makes you want to plan your next vacation for the American West.
Forty-seven of Ansel Adams’ favorite pictures are on display here, showcasing the photographer’s appreciation for the rugged mountains, winding rivers and desert dunes that can turn American travelers misty-eyed and make international tourists jealous.
“The landscape has been part of our national identity in a way many other cultures don’t experience,” Misericordia faculty member Brian Carso said. “Ansel Adams builds on that American fascination with our landscape.”
Stunning in their black-and-white clarity, the images in the “Ansel Adams: Masterworks” exhibit range from a frozen lake and cliffs in California’s Sequoia National Park to the Grand Tetons and Snake River in Wyoming to the well-known Monolith of Half-Dome, a majestic formation that challenges hikers, especially those with a fear of heights.
Carso, who will speak on “The Clearest Way into the Universe: Nature’s Meaning in the photographs of Ansel Adams” at the college on Sept. 19, can tell you about his own experiences at Half-Dome, where he camped overnight on its “shoulder,” under an incredibly starry sky. He considered not ascending further, but after coming so close he decided he had to attempt the summit.
Despite some uneasiness with the height, he said, he made the climb “by sheer force of will.”
“Hiking and camping out west, maybe pitching a tent by a giant sequoia tree when you’re two days away from the nearest road, makes you sort of measure yourself a little differently,” Carso said. “It ends up being something of a spiritual experience.”
Carso sees a sense of the spiritual in Adams’ photos, too.
“They compel us to think about time,” he said, “to measure yourself against geologic time.”
One of Adams’ photographs in particular does that in triplicate, Carso said, describing an image that shows a moon rising over a small village in New Mexico in 1941. “There are three different ways of measuring time in that one picture,” he said. “In the foreground there is the immediate, human time in the sense of the little village and the cemetery. There’s geologic time in the sense of the landscape. And, the moon, as a punctuation mark in the sky, gives us a sense of cosmic time.”
Adams’ notes about that photograph relate he was so struck by the sight he almost drove off a road. Unable to find his exposure meter, he quickly calculated the camera’s shutter speed, aperture opening and film speed before making one exposure. He was about to make another when the light suddenly changed. With sunlight no longer hitting the objects below, the drama of the moment was gone.
“I made that photo by 15 seconds,” Adams wrote.
Adams did some of his best work during the 1930s and 1940s, Carso said, and “enhanced how we thought about the natural world.”
His work attracted a lot of attention again in the late 1960s and 1970s, Carso said, because “Americans were starting to think anew about conservation.”
