Western Art News
The past and the present become one in a new Ansel Adams exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
This winter, visitors of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) have a rare opportunity to see American photographer Ansel Adams depicted in a new light amongst both his predecessors and contemporary artists his work has inspired. Running through February 24, Ansel Adams in Our Time is a collection of 200 works—nearly half of which are photographs by Adams drawn from the Lane Organization— organized chronologically yet thematically into eight sections, beginning where Adams’ own photographic journey started.
Memories formed when Adams was in his youth—like when he first visited Yosemite at age 14 with a Kodak Box Brownie camera from his father—crafted him not only as a photographer, but as the man behind the lens of some of the most iconic visual representations of American landscapes.
Adams’ work continues to inspire contemporary photographers including Mark Klett, Trevor Paglen, Catherine Opie, Abelardo Morell, Victoria Sambunaris and Binh Danh, whose photographs cohabitate with Adams’ in the exhibition. While in many ways Ansel was a modernist, he also drew inspiration from 19th-century forerunners in government survey and expedition photography including Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy O’sullivan and Frank Jay Haynes, who are also featured in Ansel Adams in Our Time.
“With this exhibition, I hope to open up new conversations around this seminal artist by looking both backward and forward in time,” says Karen Haas, MFA’S Lane Curator of Photographs. “I invite our visitors to explore the role that photography has historically played in our changing perceptions of the American West, as well as to consider Adams’ legacy of environmental activism—one that still speaks to us today.”
For more information, visit www.mfa.org.