Ansel Adams: the politics of natural space
Andy Grundberg | The New Criterion | 22nd February 2021
For a time, Ansel Adams was America’s most acclaimed photographer. What exactly was his aesthetic achievement? His images of pristine, majestic nature were not pathbreaking and nor were his technical achievements. Perhaps he was tapping into the Romantics idea of the wilderness as a “metaphor for heroic aspirations.” If so, the untouched frontier is now lost to us, making Adams images just “artifacts of a lost contentment.”