Ansel Adams

Uno de los fotógrafos más reconocidos del siglo XX, Ansel Adams (1902-1984) fue conocido por sus imágenes impresas en gran formato en blanco y negro. Pocos saben, sin embargo, que Adams trabajóextensamente en el color también.
En una carrera de más de 50 años, Adams acabó la fotografía en color de más de cuarenta de ellos, y él creía que era el medio del futuro. Además de utilizar para trabajoscomerciales, disparó de color para revistas como Life, Horizon y Fortune. También expuso su obra en color en el Museo de Arte Moderno en 1950.

Ansel Adams was the poet of the gray spectrum, theman who dipped the American sublime into the inkpot of black-and-white photography and by that means made it new again. So persuasive were his methods that because of him we tend to think of thenational parks the way we think of the Great Depression, as something we can barely conceive of in color. He almost made us believe that the whole of creation comes in the palette of a cinder block — and tobe glad about it.
(See 10 things you didn't know about national parks.)
Adams is so identified with black and white that most people would be surprised to learn that he started to shoot in colorsoon after Kodachrome was invented in the mid-1930s and that by the time of his death in 1984 he had produced nearly 3,500 color images. Though he allowed some of those pictures to be published in hislifetime, he never printed them himself, or at least not for the public. He didn't believe that the color processes of his day could produce results to compare with the rich visual deliberation, thefine-grained luxuriance of his work in black and white. To put it bluntly, he didn't think he could control the outcome with color, and for Adams control over the artistic process meant everything. Buthe valued the richness of color transparencies, looked forward to the day when it would be possible to print them to his own high standards, and came close to producing a book about color theory and...