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A tiny fiddlehead fern emerges between two palm fronds in Ansel Adams's photograph, "In the Rain Forest," taken at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The renowned photographer spent a lifetime trying to express the divinity of nature.
Ansel Adams devoted a lifetime to what he called the Natural Scene. His black-and-white photographs, capturing the grandeur of Yosemite, the pueblos of New Mexico and the stony faces of the Sierra Nevadas, added to the mythology of the rugged West. Adams insight in
black and white
By Nadine Kam
nkam@starbulletin.comMuch less is known about the times he descended from the mountains, trekked out of the desert and crossed an ocean to visit paradise. What he found in the '40s and '50s was a glimpse of Hawaii's past, present and future.
In celebration of Adams' 100th birthday, the Honolulu Academy of Arts is about to open an exhibition of 30 photos by the man considered to be the nation's most influential landscape photographer.
Photos in the exhibition are the results of trips he made to Hawaii in 1948, the reward of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1957 and 1958, when he was commissioned to create a photo book commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bishop National Bank, now First Hawaiian Bank. The result was a coffee-table book, "The Islands of Hawaii."
"He got involved because the president (Carl Hanson) of the bank had seen a book Ansel Adams had done in California, called 'The Pageant of History in Northern California,' and the bank wanted something similar to celebrate its centenary," said Adams scholar Anne Hammond by phone from England, where she just ended a Smithsonian graphic arts fellowship. She is the guest curator for the exhibition, which coincides with the release of her own book, "Ansel Adams -- Divine Performance."
"Fish Pond at Dawn," taken near Kaunakakai, Molokai.
Adams' 1958 work, "The Islands of Hawaii," with text by Edward Joesting, offered a glossy history -- no mention is made of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack -- of the U.S. territory, from the volcanic lava flows that formed the isles to the development of industry. In the book, Adams's photos of blackened fields of lava swirls and fern forests give way to images of paniolo and ranches, and finally, images of commerce as reflected in shipping and tourism. Prominent island citizens of the era, such as Honolulu Symphony Society Director George Barati, artist Jean Charlot and Bishop Museum historian Mary Kawena Pukui, are also captured in portraits.
An avid outdoorsman and Sierra Club member, Adams -- who had studied to be a concert pianist -- eventually found in photography the means to express a reverence for nature. So, in a fundamental way, the project ran counter to his beliefs.
"The bank really wanted to represent the whole spectrum of Hawaiian life," Hammond said, "but being a bank, they also wanted to encourage the economic life of Hawaii. A couple of pictures really dealt with tourism, and that was something he wasn't too happy about, as you can imagine.
"There was a feeling that Ansel Adams didn't like Hawaii. When he arrived in Waikiki, he stayed at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in the midst of the tourist boom of the late '40s and early '50s. He was, naturally, a campaigner against tourism, in favor the preserving natural beauty.
"As he got used to being here, he saw Hawaii as a much more complex place. He loved the Hawaiian people, the multiethnic culture and the beauty of the landscape," she said. This suited his political and environmental ideals.
"He grew up in the New Deal era of Roosevelt, which became a formative influence on his political life," Hammond said. In the '30s he offered his photos in support of wilderness lobbying efforts in Congress. His 1944 series on the internment of Japanese Americans at Manzanar, "Born Free and Equal," conveyed a message of ethnic tolerance when exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art, but didn't draw the response he had hoped for.
"Lots of people didn't want to hear the message," said Hammond, who said the photos, now housed in the Library of Congress and National Archives, may be due for another exhibition. It is one she would like to bring here at a later date.
HAMMOND, WHO earned her BFA at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, never met Adams, who died in 1984 at the age of 82.
"Lava Flow with Mauna Loa in the background, Hawaii," is one of the photographs Ansel Adams took for Bishop National Bank, now First Hawaiian, in the late '50s.
From what she could glean from her research, Hawaii's weather was an obstacle for Adams. "I think he was shocked. He'd come from the high sierras and didn't expect to have to deal with heat and humidity," she said.
Moist air would tend to reduce contrast in the negative, and this was a source of frustration for the consummate technician. This called for adjusting exposure measurement and filtration systems he had perfected in Northern California.
"He also had to try -- even harder than he would have in the high mountains of California -- not to be distracted by the brilliance of the colors in the Hawaiian landscape," Hammond said.
This likely also startled the photographer whose biggest contribution to photography was the Zone System, with which he taught others how to simplify a world of color for a black-and-white medium by envisioning subjects in 10 tones from white to black. This allowed for near-total control of tonal contrast.
Adams was also a founding member of the photo group f/64. In photography, f/64 refers to a small lens opening that captures every detail in focus, reflecting Adams's belief that everything in a photograph is significant. Hammond writes in her new book, "The photograph represented a model of the universal and sacred relation of things to each other."
Where: Honolulu Academy of Arts, 900 S. Beretania St. 'Ansel Adams in Hawaii'
When: Opens Thursday, continuing through Aug. 4
Admission: $7 general; $4 for 13 and younger, 62 and older and military;
free for members and children under 12; free admission the first Sunday and
first Wednesday of each month
Call: 532-8700
Special: Guest curator Anne Hammond will speak about "Ansel Adams: The Poetry of Landscapes," at 2 p.m. July 7. Free.
There are a couple of photographs in the Hawaii show that are among her favorites. "In the Rain Forest: Hawaii National Park," taken in 1948, features two fern fronds with a tiny fiddlehead fern emerging between the two. "Vine and Rock" was also taken in 1948 at Pu'uhonua O Honaunau, the City of Refuge. In it, a native morning glory clings to lava rock as it climbs from the brackish water at the edge of the sea.
"It has a sense of survival and profound sense of growth and vitality," Hammond said. "This is what Ansel Adams wanted to convey. He was so excited about the photo that he wrote to friends that he couldn't wait to put it in his portfolio in memory of (his mentor) Alfred Stieglitz."
Hammond believes Adams would have had no trouble navigating today's digital landscape.
"He was right at the cutting edge of every new technology that evolved. He worked very closely with printers so that they could make the most of technical advances."
He was so successful, his book prints are sometimes mistaken for photographs. And his photos stand up very well against today's colorful competition. "In a period when color is all around us, the great tradition of the black-and-white photograph is even more valued," Hammond said. "People appreciate it even more now than they did 10 years ago."
And while tact might have prevented Adams from saying what he really thought of Hawaii's progress, his photos, nearly 50 years later, have an eloquence of their own, depicting what has been and still stands to be lost if people do not open their eyes.
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