Learning Process From Ansel Adams
Weighing the journey against the image when making a photo
It is said that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but a smart PR consultant will warn about the dangers of over-saturation — people getting tired of you. Performing artists know the value of leaving your audience wanting more, but visual artists don’t tend to think about that. There’s probably no better example of, pardon the pun, an overexposed artist than Ansel Adams.
Some of this is the result of Adams himself, though there’s an argument to be made that Ansel Adams’ goal was to sell the beauty of the natural world as much as his own photographic output. Whatever his intent, after he died the Ansel Adams trust went into overdrive. You could hardly walk into a bookstore in the mid-nineteen-eighties (which usually meant a B. Dalton’s or Walden Books) without seeing an array of Ansel Adams calendars and desk calendars, planners and possibly posters. The technology wasn’t good enough then for T-shirts or baked goods to be festooned with his photos, but that didn’t mean that you didn’t see Ansel Adams images seemingly everywhere.
I’ve always found it strange that, while you can walk into a writing class, ask the students who their favorite writers are, and get a litany of names, if you ask a photo class who their favorite photographers are you usually get a noticeable bout of silence. If that silence is broken, it’s probably because someone has sheepishly offered “Ansel Adams?”
“Yeah,” we all think. “Ansel Adams. Beautiful black and white prints of Yosemite, yadda yadda yadda. Who cares?” Maybe we’ll pay lip service to the fact that it’s different to see original prints, but still, because of over-saturation it’s easy to write off this person who was a de facto, fundamental benchmark of photographic history.
As I write this in April of 2023, there is a huge exhibition of Adams’ work at the de Young museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (the site of several important Adams exhibits in the1930s). It runs until July and if you’re a photographer, you should try to see it. I say this in the same way I would say “if you’re a sculptor, you should try to see the Statue of David” or “if you’re a painter you should go see Monet’s water lilies, or Van Gogh’s Starry Night.”
I’m not going to detail what all you notice when viewing Adams’ actual prints as opposed to reproductions. By way of illustration I’m simply going to say that this exhibit includes the work of many other great photographers, and they’re mixed in with Adams’ prints and spread amongst several galleries. Each time you enter a new gallery you can glance around the room at the dozens of prints there and, in that glance, immediately know which ones are the Adams prints. I cannot think of another photographer who can evince that reaction.
Obviously, Adams was skilled at composition, but good composition of otherworldly landscapes like Yosemite Valley and the Snake River isn’t that hard. What made his prints work so well was his technical mastery. When you look at many of his images, including Moonrise, Hernandez, you realize they are preposterously unrealistic. Yet his understanding of what you can get away with when opening a shadow here, or closing one there, or processing a mid-tone just so was extraordinary. As he said over and over, pre-visualization was absolutely necessary for his process to work.
But consider what “pre-visualization” meant when using the technology he employed. He didn’t mean “imagining the composition on a piece of paper.” He meant understanding that the composition he had in mind was dependent on certain shadows being rendered as complete darkness; that highlights required a specific quality, and mid-tones had a particular level of detail. He had to have those things in mind so that, before he took the shot, he could make a plan for how to develop both the negative and the print. Then he had to pull off those two processes.
To facilitate this level of planning, Adams concocted the Zone System (with help) which is irrelevant to a modern digital photographer because we get all the same power through the combination of the histogram, masks and Levels or Curves. We have a sizable portion of Ansel Adams in a box. What’s more, what you get of him is perfectly reproducible every time.
As I left the “Adams in Our Time” exhibit, which concludes with a nice short film showing Adams at work, shooting a photo and making voluminous notes about his exposure and development plan, I couldn’t help but wonder about how Adams’ post-processing ability affected his real-time vision. Did pre-visualizing to his insane degree change the way he recognized and evaluated potential subject matter as he was moving about the world? I have to imagine it did, especially since he often had only a dozen plates to work with and so didn’t want to waste a shot. I’m not just talking about the oft-stated idea of slowing down while you work, I’m asking whether his actual nervous system and visual sense was altered by his process.
I think about post-production when I’m shooting and I have a fairly technical understanding of my post-production process. I know how much dynamic range my camera has and how much I can expect to push and pull an edit. And while shooting I’ll often think “when I print I’m gonna let that shadow drop out” or “I’m gonna blow out the sky” or “I’m gonna render the sky dark and the highlights on that tree bright.” But I also have a sense of “shoot now, ask questions about the light later.” With a 360 camera I can even shoot now and figure out composition later.
Is that more empowering than Adams’ process? I don’t know. I was pleased to see that my process has led to what I think is a better photo of Zabriskie Point than what Adams took. (See my image above. If you don’t like it then I’ll simply say “you need to see a print of it.” If you’re a new photographer you should memorize that phrase now.)
Digital tools are, in a way, an electronic manifestation of our thought processes. They allow us to remove physical skill and constraint from our creative process. But we are physical beings. Our nervous system is not constrained to our brain — it spreads through our entire body — and seeing is a physical process. In Adams’ day, making a photo was completely dependent on physical ability. How much of his understanding came from his hands, rather than his brain?
I mention this because our digital tools are increasingly removing more and more of the physical from our process. Even if you’ve only ever worked digitally, your post-production process requires less physical prowess today than it used to, as AI-driven tools replace Clone Stamps, compositing skills, and more. AI image generators remove all of your physical skill and place you solely in the realm of art director — a skillset, to be sure, but a different one.
Seeing Adams’ work was yet another reminder for me that, as nice as it is to have a good finished photo, process and skill is the enjoyable part of making an image. Digital tools make it easier and easier to have an Adams-level final product, but at the expense of satisfaction derived from process. As we move into this era of greater imaging ease, you might want to start paying attention to your relationship to your own process. Beginning photographers can simply be excited to have a nice image to show off, but with experience, the final image becomes less important than the exploration of light and the understanding of how to realize that light. That exploration not only helps you produce better work it changes the way you see even when you’re not shooting. Your experience of the world is forever altered by what happens to you during your process.
Obviously, I can’t know what Adams would have thought about seeing his images in so many places and forms. Nor can I say what he would have thought of Photoshop — he missed Digital Darkroom, a Photoshop predecessor, by only three years — but my hunch is he would have embraced such technology. I also have no doubt about his commitment to conservation of the natural world. But what I took from the incredible volume of amazing work on display in the “Ansel Adams In Our Time” exhibit was that what Adams was really married to was enjoyment of process. We live in an era of “feeds” of disposable images, shoveled out by “content creators,” and each day we expect to see new material. But I believe that, more than a long scroll of images, understanding and appreciating process is the most important thing any artist can achieve.
AI is about to offer the option of eliminating process altogether. That means that now is a great time to take stock of how much of your satisfaction as a photographer — or any type of artist — comes from the end result, and how much comes from making that result.
