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Monday, January 30, 2006
 
ANSEL ADAMS: LOVE, FRIENDSHIP, AND ART

Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams, 1960, by Nancy Newhall

Letter from Ansel Adams to Cedric Wright, June 10, 1937:

"Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood -- children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love -- more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.

Ansel"

--- --- ---

In the summer of 1936, Ansel Adams worked past the point of exhaustion preparing for a one-person photography exhibit at the request of Alfred Stieglitz, curator of "An American Place" gallery in New York. Stieglitz was the most highly respected photographer of his day and Adams was largely unknown. Partly due to the importance of the show, and partly because Patsy English, his darkroom assistant, pushed him to higher levels of excellence in his prints than he had ever achieved before, Adams produced what many consider to be the best set of prints of his life. Immersed in the project, they would sometimes work for days without sleep. Complicating the summer, Adams fell in love with his assistant. Physically worn out at the conclusion of the project, and torn between his conflicted feelings for his wife Virginia and for Patsy, Adams had a nervous breakdown.

Loyalty to his wife and children and a desire to "do what is right" took priority over his feelings for his assistant. Time spent in his beloved Yosemite brought emotional and physical healing. As he emerged from the breakdown months later, he wrote the letter above to Cedric Wright. It is now considered a classic and the final paragraph is quoted in a host of photo books and on dozens of web sites. The exhibit at the Stieglitz gallery was a huge success and Adams went on to become one of the most famous landscape photographers of the 20th Century.

Half Dome, 1927, Ansel Adams
Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927, by Ansel Adams. This photo was a major turning point in Adams conception of his own photography, and a validation of his decision to switch from concert pianist to professional photographer.

Sources:
PBS: Ansel Adams with an edited version of the letter to Cedric Wright
Transcript of Ken Burn's Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film
Text of the letter to Cedric Wright

The Ken Burns documentary is well worth watching.

Monday, January 23, 2006
 
KISS KONICA-MINOLTA GOODBYE



In the saddest photo news of the last week, Konica-Minolta announced their departure from the camera and photo business. Minolta and Konica have both had a long and good history in the photography business. I hate to see good competition get out of the photo business.

The Konica-Minolta 7D digital SLR received excellent reviews as I pointed out in a brief review last July. One of the great features of the K-M7 is that AS (anti-shake) is built into the camera rather than into individual lenses (like Image Stabilization in some Canon lenses or Vibration Reduction in some Nikon lenses). I'm jealous. I wish I had Anti-Shake in my Canon bodies. This kind of breakthrough feature keeps other manufacturers on their toes. They also produced some very fine point and shoot digital cameras.

Photo assets will be transferred to Sony who will continue to market equipment with the Konica-Minolta mount but the Sony label. If you are thinking about adding to your collecction of Maxxum/Dynax lenses, now is a good time to do it.

Monday, January 16, 2006
 
I HAVE A DREAM . . .

Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963, Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.

The text below is from the end of King's "I have a dream" speech, one of the most significant and powerful speeches of the 20th century. Links to the full speech and an audio file are below.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together." [Isaiah 40:4-5]**

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of
Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!


**Isaiah 40:4-5 (King James Version of the Holy Bible). Quotation marks are excluded from part of this moment in the text because King's rendering of Isaiah 40:4 does not precisely follow the KJV version from which he quotes (e.g., "hill" and "mountain" are reversed in the KJV). King's rendering of Isaiah 40:5, however, is precisely quoted from the KJV.

Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.

The complete text and a downloadable audio file of the whole speech can be found at American Rhetoric.

 

 
   
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